Kitchens of the Great Midwest (16 page)

“Actually, it’s about the same,” Eva said.

“Really?” Prager said. “They’re right on the lake where the fish is from?”

“Why’d you stiff the waitress on our date, by the way? Jobe says you left her like a dollar.”

“I left her every dollar I brought.”

“If you knew where we were going, you shoulda brought more.”

“Well, I didn’t know you were gonna order such expensive shit.”

“It’s getting late,” she said, shoving the rest of the fish in her mouth. “We should get back.”

 • • • 

She fell asleep in the car on the way home. Prager tried to tell himself it was because she was just that comfortable with him. But when he dropped her off and she just hugged him, he felt like an eighteen-wheeler had driven off a cliff and landed on his heart.

He went home and turned off the lights in his room and put on the song “Why,” by Annie Lennox, the
MTV Unplugged
version, the one he got on a mix CD from one of his ex-girlfriends, and put it on repeat, he felt that fucking sad. He stared up at the Radiohead poster on his ceiling and felt the lyrics echo in his heart like a penny tossed down an empty well. Why was this boat sinking? They had barely even started rowing. But it was.

He needed to text her, and apologize again, but it was 12:20 at night.
Finally he thought he should just see if she was up, and if she was, he’d apologize. At 12:22 he texted
You up?
and stared at the little screen on his flip phone waiting for her response until 12:45, when he finally plugged the phone back into the charger and turned the ringer off and closed his eyes.

 • • • 

The next morning he was woken up at noon by his dad grabbing his foot.

“You forgot to take the canoe off the car,” Eli said. “I had to drive it to church and back with a canoe on it.”

“Oh,” Prager said. “Sorry.”

“Pat’s coming over for dinner in five hours. Have the canoe off the car by then. And dress yourself nice.”

 • • • 

Vik Gupta was over at Ken Kovacs’s house, jamming in the garage they used as a practice space, when Prager drove there to give the canoe back. Vik and Ken were deeply unimpressed with him when he told them the story of his fishing trip with Eva.

“You blew it,” Vik said. “You had a woman on a boat, even, and you didn’t execute.”

“Have you been in a canoe?”

“Anywhere where two people can fit, they can have sex. It’s the law.”

“So what the fuck you gonna do now?” Ken asked. Prager had known Ken for longer, and Ken was a little more invested in Prager’s emotional life journey.

“I don’t know,” Prager said. “I already called her today and left her a message, and left her a text both last night and this morning.”

“Maybe call her again, and apologize again.”

Vik got up from his drum stool. “Ken, weren’t you listening? He got hugged at the end of a second date! Hugged! I wouldn’t wish that on anybody! Seriously, you’d rather get slapped in the face than hugged!”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Ken said. “You can work with getting slapped in the face. There’s a lot of emotion there, you just have to flip the dime.”

“Prager, here’s what you should do tomorrow. Flowers. Chocolate. And another gift, something personal, something only the two of you would know. And have you written her a song yet?”

“Yeah, I started.”

“Well, get on it tonight, master it, play it for her ASAP.”

“What if I have to skip band practice again tomorrow?”

Vik and Ken glanced at each other. “This is an alt-country band,” Vik said. “All this heartache is
comme il faut
. Jeff Tweedy would kill for a week like this. You might get a whole album of lyrics from just yesterday alone.”

Ken nodded. “Go get ’em out there.”

 • • • 

Prager was in his bedroom practicing “Steamy Night on a Steamboat” when his dad knocked on the door. Prager had lost track of time; it was 4:56.

“She’s here,” Eli said, smiling. “Come out and say hi.”

 • • • 

No way was this woman thirty-five. Maybe fifty-five. She had thick legs, wrinkles around her eyes, and gray hairs sprouting from her hairline. She was smiling, but Prager could totally tell it was a fake smile just to be polite. She had a large orange ceramic baking pan with her covered in cellophane, and there were two more unfamiliar dishes on the dining room table already.

“What is all this?” Prager said.

“Pat’s made a home-cooked meal for our entire family,” Eli said.

It was disturbing enough to walk out into the living room on a Sunday afternoon in the fall and not hear a lurid NFL game chundering from the TV, much less to feel a cheerless, significant silence, and to see
this strange woman, and all of her food, and all of its invasive smells, filling the empty spaces in their raw home.

Pat Jorgenson extended her hand. “So nice to meet you, Will,” she said. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Yeah, OK,” Prager said.

“Only the good things,” Eli said, patting his son on the back, which he pretty much never did ever. “Julie!” Eli shouted.

“Just a minute, Dad, God!” came a girl’s voice from behind a closed bedroom door.

Eli glanced at Pat as if to say,
Teenagers
. “Please, be seated. Pat, may I get you something to drink? I bought a bottle of Chardonnay.”

“Just water for now, thank you.”

“Will, if you want any white wine, help yourself. I hear it goes with seafood.”

Prager had never heard his dad say anything close to those sentences in his entire life. “OK, where’s the seafood?”

“Pat made tuna casserole. In the orange pan.”

“You know I’m a vegetarian, Dad.”

Pat looked at Eli, but avoided his eye contact. “Oh, I’m sorry, your father didn’t tell me.”

“You just went fishing yesterday,” Eli said, “you can’t be that much of a vegetarian. Just pick out all the fish if you have to.”

 • • • 

Julie came out of her room wearing a Minnesota Vikings jacket zipped all the way up, pink hot pants, and a Lone Ranger mask.

Eli shook his head. “Julie.”

“This what I wanna wear.”

“Nice jacket,” Pat said.

“I don’t care what you think,” Julie said. “Why is she sitting in Mom’s chair?”

Pat looked at Eli. “I should switch chairs with you.”

Eli didn’t move, except to look Julie in the face. “At least take the mask off.”

“If the mask goes, I go.”

Pat touched Eli’s hand. “It’s fine.”

Eli said, “We should say grace.”

“We don’t say grace in this family, Dad,” Julie said.

“It’s OK, Eli,” said Pat.

Prager lifted his wineglass. “
L’chaim
,” he said.

“So what is all this repugnant garbage?” Julie asked.

“Julie,” Eli said. “Be nice.”

“Why? I don’t want to be here.”

“Remember what I said? No sports for a week?”

“Sounds like a deal to me. Can I go now?”

“No, just five minutes. Just tell Pat something about yourself. She’s heard a lot about you guys and wants to get to know you better.”

“I just got my first period last month,” Julie said.

Prager laughed; he couldn’t help it. Pat pursed her lips as she passed around the au gratin potatoes she had made.

“Julie.”

Julie twisted a slotted spoon around in a casserole dish.”What’s this?”

“Au gratin potatoes,” Pat said.

“Rotten potatoes? Looks like it.”

Prager laughed again.

Eli pounded his fist on the table. “Julie. Both of you.”

Pat looked up. “She can leave if she wants.”

Julie immediately got up from the table. “God, thank you.”

Eli pointed to her. “Don’t leave your room.”

 • • • 

Julie slammed her bedroom door and put on the song “My Neck, My Back” by Khia, and turned it up real loud. Prager started to laugh again. Eli almost got up from the table, but Pat restrained him.

“Don’t,” she said. “Just ignore it.”

“Will, tell Pat about your country music band,” Eli said.

“I’m actually really busy writing a song tonight,” Prager said. “For a girl.”

“Well, you should get to it after dinner.”

“Mind if I go and just work on it right now? I’m kinda in the zone.”

“Sure,” Pat said. “I’ll make you a plate.”

Prager was going to say,
That’s OK,
but she seemed so eager to get Eli’s unpleasant children out of the dining room, she had piled up the tuna casserole, boiled string beans, and potatoes au gratin on his plate before he could object.

Prager didn’t look at his dad when he took the plate and left the dining room. Pat said something like “Nice to meet you,” which he didn’t respond to, and the first thing he did when he got to his room was dump the plate in the garbage.

It was actually real hard to write a song on the acoustic guitar with that dirty hardcore rap song playing in the background, but Prager wasn’t about to declaw his sister’s protest. For a moment, he tried to think of a day when he’d felt closer to Julie, when he’d loved her more, and only the day of their parents’ accident came to mind.

 • • • 

An hour later, his dad was still somehow eating dinner with that woman, and Prager was starving, but he’d also finished “Steamy Night on a Steamboat,” and was at last ready to play it for Eva.

Her cell phone went straight to voice mail. He took a deep breath and tried her house phone. It rang a long time. Finally, her dad answered. He sounded wasted.

“Yeah?” Jarl said.

“Hi, this is Will Prager. Is Eva home?”

“Nope,” Jarl said. “She’s working that restaurant job.”

Seemed weird, for that late on a Sunday evening. “OK, can you tell her to call me as soon as she gets home?”

“Yeah, sure,” Jarl said. “Are you the guy whose band plays Jimmy Buffett tunes?”

Will was dismayed at Jarl’s memory of their brief interaction, but he wasn’t in the mood to have this particular conversation. “Yeah,” he found himself saying. “And I gotta go, I gotta get to practice.”

“Next time you play, make me a VHS tape of it so I can see you guys,” Eva’s dad said.

“We will,” Prager said for some reason, realizing that he had no idea how he could make that happen, even if he wanted to.

“I’ll tell her Jimmy called,” Jarl said, and laughed before he hung up.

 • • • 

Prager stopped her in the hall before fifth period. Her hair was up, she wasn’t wearing any makeup, and she looked tired. Even the white T-shirt she was wearing, which read
LARK
MANAGED
SERVICES
and looked like a promotional giveaway shirt from a company picnic or something, seemed out of character.

“How come you haven’t returned any of my texts or my calls?” he asked her.

“I was going to, I’ve just been super busy.”

“Too busy to even return a text? What’s up with that?”

“So, what do you want to tell me?”

“I want to play you the song I wrote you.”

“I don’t know if I have the time for that today,” she said, leaning against the lockers in the hallway. “I gotta work at the store after school every day this week.”

“Well, maybe after you get off work, then. What time is that?”

“Seven,” she said.

“I’ll call you at seven-fifteen. Why do you have to work every day? Are you trying to avoid me or something?”

“My dad got fired from his job,” she said. “So I gotta pick up all the
shifts I can. It’s not about you at all.” She glanced at the doorway to their history classroom. “I guess we’d better get to class.”

 • • • 

He sat in the front row for an hour, watching Killer Keeley talk about the French and Indian War, and tried to think of his next move. Vik Gupta would know exactly what he should do, but he couldn’t talk to Vik until after school. She was obviously not so excited to see him, like she used to be, but one thing was still certain. If he could just figure out a way to play “Steamy Night on a Steamboat” for her today, she’d fall in love with him in a second. By the end of class, he’d decided that this was the only plan that would work.

 • • • 

At 7:15 p.m. and nine seconds, Prager called Eva’s cell, and once again it went straight to VM. He tried her apartment, and no one answered; a machine didn’t even pick up. He tried again, three minutes later, and got the same result. He tried one more time at 7:25, and nothing had changed. It rang and rang, eleven, twelve, thirteen times.

He threw his guitar in his dad’s car and drove south toward Prescott. The Built to Spill tape was still in the tape deck, and he just let it keep going; it might as well be the damn soundtrack to everything.

 • • • 

He didn’t know where the Steamboat Inn’s kitchen was, so he went inside and asked the headwaiter, a young fat blonde woman with a ponytail, who said that he could either get there through the
EMPLOYEES
ONLY
door by the bathroom or through the door on the side of the building by the employee parking lot. He said thanks, and while he was standing there he noticed the waitress from his date standing by the bar, putting cocktails on a tray, and he went up to her and put a ten-dollar bill between the drinks.

“Sorry about last time,” he said.

From the look on her face it didn’t seem like she even recognized him.

 • • • 

Prager picked up his guitar from the backseat and walked around back to the employee lot and saw that the black wooden door to the kitchen was swung all the way open; between Prager and the kitchen, there was just a heavy-looking black metal screen door, and even from a distance he could see a lot of what was happening inside. It was really bright in there, a stark, hospital white from above, and way less fancy than he would’ve guessed a kitchen like that would look. There were big silver basins and spigot heads on long snakes and black rubber mats on the floor with holes in them. There were maybe six or seven people in there, all wearing white, all terribly busy cutting meat, tossing salad, peeling fruit.

He saw Eva in there, in her new style of a white T-shirt and pants with a lot of pockets, standing next to a woman he didn’t recognize who was dressed exactly the same way—maybe that Maureen O’Brien person—and they were peeling something over a silver bowl and laughing. It was too bright in there for them to see clearly outside, and no one so much as looked in his direction.