Kitchens of the Great Midwest (15 page)

“Dad, is it OK if I put a canoe on the car?” Prager asked.

“What the hell you want to do that for?” Eli said. “Some kinda joke?”

“No, to drive it up to Mille Lacs Lake on Saturday to go fishing. What are you doing to it right now?”

Eli pulled himself out from under the car. His face and hands were smudged with black. “Just changing the oil. Who are you going fishing with?”

“That girl, Eva,” he said.

“Oh,” Eli said. “In that case, I approve. Bring her over, I’d like to meet her.”

“Well, we’ve only been out once, Dad.”

Eli seemed to ignore that. “I’m gonna have Pat Jorgenson over for dinner on Sunday. She’s excited to meet you and Julie.”

“Who’s Pat Jorgenson?”

“My date from last Friday.”

This took a moment to sink in.

“I’m not even sure if I’ll be here,” Prager said.

“You’ll be here, or no car on Saturday, how’s that?” Eli said, and wheeled himself back under the Ford.

 • • • 

Before he met Eva on Saturday morning, he had to stop by his bass player Ken Kovacs’s place to borrow Ken’s parents’ canoe and tie it down to the roof of the car. Their house was where the Lonesome Cowboys practiced. Ken was the fifth child of five, and the last one at home, and his parents, Arnie and May, seemed eager to have his friends around. They were generous in the way of people running a garage sale who give things away to the folks who come at the end.

In the meantime he looked up the word “Moonglow” because it had been bothering him and he felt it would’ve been dorky to ask her. He
wanted to know what she knew without her having to tell him—it seemed more manly that way—so he looked it up on the Internet. He doubted it was the Benny Goodman tune; he’d narrowed it down to either the magnolia tree or the yellow-orange heirloom tomato, and knowing her, it was probably the tomato. Did she want Moonglow tomatoes? He would buy some for her if she did. He hoped that they were hard to find, and that he’d still somehow find them and, better yet, somehow sneak them into her locker as a surprise. Romantic gifts were so much better when they were rare, personal, and unexpected. Maybe he’d fill her locker with Moonglow tomatoes and wouldn’t even leave a note. (But perhaps it could wait until he knew for sure that she meant the tomatoes.) In any case, his most significant gift to her was already in progress, cost him absolutely nothing but time, and would be ready in two days, tops.

 • • • 

He texted her from the parking lot, and almost didn’t recognize her at first when she came outside wearing a white crew-neck shirt, a baseball cap, and tan pants with a lot of pockets. Her nails were still black and she had lipstick and eye makeup on, but otherwise she barely looked like a Goth anymore.

“Hey, cool outfit,” Prager said, only because he thought everything she wore looked great on her.

“Thanks. Closest thing I had to fishing clothes. Good-looking canoe!” She tossed some Whole Earth bags full of cooking supplies in the back of the car, and when she got in, they kissed, briefly, like a couple that’s been going out for a while.

“So how was your Friday night?” she asked.

“Pretty mellow,” Prager said. He couldn’t muzzle his enthusiasm for his big personal surprise any longer. “I actually started writing a song for you. You want to know what it’s called?”

“What?”

“‘Steamy Night on a Steamboat.’”

Eva laughed. “How does it go?”

“Wait until it’s done, and I’ll play it for you,” he said. He’d written a song for a girl twice before, and man oh man did those end up being some memorable nights.

“OK,” she said. “Where are the poles and the bait and everything?”

“All that stuff’s in the trunk. The bait we can get up there at a gas station.” It’d been a while, but as a kid he’d been fishing a bunch of times, usually with uncles or grandparents. His own parents hardly used their poles; Prager didn’t even ask his dad if he could borrow them.

 • • • 

“I can’t wait to grill some fresh walleye,” she said, and she touched his arm as he drove, and kept it there. The Current was playing “Fade into You,” by Mazzy Star, which was incredible, and he wished the song would last forever and her hand would never let him go, even if it was really awkward for her to hold it there like that.

 • • • 

While on the 169 North, into pine tree country, he found himself talking about his dad’s dating life. He didn’t plan on it, it just happened. The idea of his dad going out on dates with people and maybe even sleeping with people was like a nuclear bomb falling on a pit of toxic waste in his brain, and if he didn’t have Eva in his life to distract him and make him feel good, who knows what he’d be capable of.

“The worst thing is,” Prager said, “he’s not ready.”

“How do you know?” She had her hand near his leg while he drove.

“You can tell just by being around him,” Prager said. “He’s a lot angrier. He hardly listens to me or Julie about anything. He’s just going to break this stupid woman’s heart.”

“How do you know she’s stupid?” Eva asked.

“She must be if she’s dating him. In the state he’s in.”

“Have you met her?”

“Nope, and don’t want to either. I guess she’s a widow too, so maybe she’s just desperate.”

“People need people,” Eva said. “What’s wrong with that?”

That sentiment kind of pissed Prager off; it missed the point entirely. “Well, has your dad dated anyone since your mom died? I don’t imagine that was a day that you circled on your wall calendar.”

“He’s not even my real dad,” Eva said, matching his piqued tone.

Prager stared straight ahead at the road; he didn’t know to respond. Unfortunately, Eva spoke next, her voice now much softer.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that. Nobody knows I know that. Well, like, my cousins do. But that’s it.”

Prager glanced at her face. She didn’t look back at him. “How did you find out?”

“I found my birth certificate the last time we moved.”

“Wow. So you know who your birth parents are? Are they still alive?”

“One of them is, maybe. I don’t know. I’m sorry I brought it up. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“OK,” Prager said, feeling bad that she didn’t yet trust him with that kind of personal information.

“Who’s playing at First Avenue this month?” she asked, making it clear that the previous topic was off the table.

Of course he knew; he knew every band that was playing through October. Just then, he really didn’t feel like naming off all the ones he’d even consider seeing, but it was clear that’s what she wanted to talk about, not the stuff that was emotionally important to
her,
so he went with it, and they ended up talking about music nonstop for pretty much the whole rest of the drive.

 • • • 

It was a good thing that Eva was tall and strong, because they needed two people to untie that heavy wooden canoe from the car and portage
it to the pier. It felt like one of the last days of summer, with just a bit of chill coming off the massive lake, and the water was clustered with motorboats and canoes. When he looked at the empty parts of the beach, he imagined that they were 1850s pioneers, paddling to find a new homestead in Ojibwa country.

 • • • 

It turned out that getting in a canoe was way harder than it looked. Plus, sitting on those little benches in the thing was kind of precarious. Prager forgot to bring life jackets; lucky for them, walleye were usually caught close to shore.

Eva had no qualms about digging her hand into a Styrofoam cup of nightcrawlers and piercing one of those struggling little guys twice through with a fish hook. It made him think of his mom. The handful of times they’d gone fishing as a family, she’d always baited her own hooks, even when they were using leeches. She’d been a straight-A student in her teens but liked motorcycles and baseball and dive bars and getting her hands dirty; she was awesome like that.

It was something to watch Eva’s hands on his mom’s old rod, doing the same things he’d only seen one other woman do before, impaling a feisty nightcrawler twice through. He got really sad all of a sudden, and it must’ve shown in his eyes.

Eva glanced up at him. “Don’t look so upset,” she said, in a half-joking tone. “It’s a law of the universe. You gotta kill things in order to live.”

Prager took a deep breath as he pulled a worm from the cup, going along with the pretense that it was the worm killing that disturbed him, as wimpy as that made him seem.

 • • • 

After an hour, they caught one gold-and-brown-striped fish that was kind of small, and they put him back. Prager swore it was a baby walleye; Eva seemed fairly sure it wasn’t.

After another hour of drowning worms and losing them in little nibbles, it was almost 5:00 p.m., and supposedly the best time to catch walleye was in the evening; clearly, they were just too eager and had started too early.

 • • • 

Finally, around 5:30, Eva’s red-and-white bobber plunked below the water, and her thin green rod bowed with an invigorating weight. It was another one of the gold-and-brown guys, beautiful and gasping, held aloft by his lips, urgently splattering the air. He was small, but still bigger than the last one, and Eva and Prager were hungry for any kind of victory. Prager couldn’t speak for Eva, obviously, but he wanted to get the fishing and grilling and eating part over with so they could start making out again and he could more vigorously touch the boobs he had just sorta grazed last time.

 • • • 

Prager was at the ready with the blue Playmate cooler full of melting ice to meet the fish as Eva swung it into the boat, unhooked its lips, and closed the lid on their quarry. For some reason, they high-fived afterwards. Until that moment, he had looked askance at people who called fishing a sport, but the catharsis of it all made it feel like they’d somehow competed and won.

“Well, that might be big enough for both of us,” Prager said. “Wanna call it?”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “I think we can get more.”

He was actually a little afraid that she would get super into it. They’d been out on the lake for three hours at that point and Prager figured that this part of the mission was now clearly accomplished, but she acted like they were just getting going.

“How much can we eat, anyway?” he asked.

“One more, come on,” Eva said. “After all the work getting here.”

 • • • 

In the end, the one was all they caught, and when they lifted the wet canoe out of the water, the sun was setting. They stopped a bearded guy in a vest who was lugging a large cooler across the parking lot and asked him where they could grill their fish. He asked how many they had, and Prager showed him.

“This a walleye, right?” Prager asked.

The bearded guy looked as if you’d just asked him whether Kirby Puckett was a man or a woman. “Nope,” he said, “that’s a yellow perch.”

“Is it edible?”

“Oh sure,” the guy said. “It’s a panfish. Great eating.”

 • • • 

The guy directed them to a nearby park in the city of Isle with outdoor grills. It looked like an awesome place to have sex for the first time, because it was free, and had trees and a view of the lake, but there were a ton of people there. Prager decided he’d get to work on the fire, as Eva dug a pan and a steak knife out of her grocery bag.

“Good thing I just learned how to fillet a fish,” Eva said. “The one thing I could really use though is an actual fillet knife.”

“Where’d you learn to fillet?” Prager asked, shoving balled-up newspaper between the charcoal briquettes, like his dad taught him once.

“At the Steamboat.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, it’s awesome. Everyone there is super nice. They let me help with a whole bunch of stuff. Prime rib. Lobster. Walleye.”

“How many times have you been there?”

“Not counting the time with you? Three more times.”

“Did they hire you to work there or something?”

“I’m sort of their kitchen intern, which is awesome. Everyone there is teaching me a bunch of stuff. There’s this one cook, Maureen O’Brien, she’s super nice. She’s letting me do all of her prep work.”

“How much are they paying you?”

“I said I would work for free—I offered.”

“Sounds like slave labor.”

“No, it’s not. They give me dinner—that’s more than fine with me. And I get to take home food for my dad. And Jobe said he’s going to try to get me a real kitchen job, if not there, then somewhere really cool. He says I have a once-in-a-generation palate.”

“I think he’s just trying to get in your pants, is what I think.”

“You know what, fuck you,” Eva said.

Prager almost felt like he’d lost his balance. People had said this to him before, but this was different. He had hurt somebody, and she had hurt him back. But he was still right, he was sure of it.

“I’m just saying, he didn’t pay any attention to
me
last Thursday.”

“He’s with somebody, for your information.”

“That doesn’t matter. Men don’t care about that.”

“And you would know that how?”

This was totally sucking ass. He wanted to make her apologize for not telling him what she was up to, not finger himself as the unfaithful pervert that Jobe probably was. “How come you didn’t ever tell me you were going down there?”

“You never asked. You never ask me what I did yesterday, or last night, or anything. I ask you about your day, and then you go off on a tangent about it.”

“No I don’t,” he said. “I’ve asked you how your day was tons of times.”

“That’s not how I remember it.”

“Well, I have. Totally.”

“Have it your way, then,” she said. “How’s it going with the fire over there? I need to heat the pan up before I put the oil in.”

 • • • 

The perch fillets were lightly breaded and spittin’ in the pan before Prager realized that he was the one who had better apologize if he was going to get so much as a kiss out of this whole sorry day. She accepted the apology, but when they sat next to each other on the picnic table and ate their pan-fried yellow perch in the dark, she was quiet.

“This is way fresher than anything you could get at the Steamboat,” Prager said at one point.