Kitchens of the Great Midwest (17 page)

 • • • 

He walked to his car, put the guitar in the backseat, and got the Sexy Gran’pa beer koozie out of the glove box where he’d left it for good luck. He came back to the screen door, and quietly crammed the beer koozie in around eye level, in the space between the frame and the screen.

 • • • 

She found him the next morning, before school, by the vending machines.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said.

“How did you know to find me here?” he asked her.

“Your friends told me this is where you hang out,” she said.

They walked outside, past where all the heavy metal dudes smoked cigarettes, all the way to the highway, almost.

“Well, I got your message of sorts, last night.”

“Yeah.”

“So is that it, are you done with me?”

“I’m assuming you’re done with me. You tell me you’re gonna be home at seven-fifteen and you’re not. That’s totally shitty.”

“The restaurant called me and wanted me to come in.”

“You could at least call me and tell me that your plans have changed.”

“I admit, that was careless of me. And I’m sorry. But part of it is that I just don’t know if I can handle you right now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t think you’re ready for what you want,” she said.

“How would you know?”

“You know, maybe I don’t. But either way, you’re like the most intense guy of all time, really. It’s a lot, OK? I’m just saying, take it easy. I’ll be here.”

“You’ll be here?”

“But in the meantime, let’s just be friends.”

Prager had heard that one before, and pretty much learned to turn off what a girl said after she said that, because it was all bullshit.

 • • • 

He didn’t talk to her before fifth period or sit next to her during seventh period anymore, but they still said hi when they passed each other in the halls, out of politeness, he guessed, but that was it. To other people in class, no one could probably tell they’d ever kissed, that he wrote a song for her, and that she’d been the last thought on his mind every night.

At home, meanwhile, Eli, Julie, and even that awful Pat who was around all the time now, they all knew what was up, and he didn’t try to hide it from them either, mostly because it made it easier for him to be
curt and disagreeable without being hassled. He had to quit listening to Built to Spill, Neutral Milk Hotel, Annie Lennox, Mazzy Star, Soul Coughing, and all of the other bands that reminded him of her even a little bit, but his own band got more of his time, and they even scheduled a gig for December, at the Rec Center where he used to see Smarmy Kitten shows.

Alone in his bedroom, he helplessly ruminated on what she said, specifically the phrases “not ready” and “I’ll be here.” As the weeks passed, with this in mind, he remained calm and respectful and not intense. By mid-November, he and Eva were even in the same eight-person group in history class, pretending to be delegates from the four southern colonies. And the day before Thanksgiving, she even touched him on the arm twice. He talked to Vik Gupta about it over Thanksgiving break and the first Monday back in school he went in twenty minutes before the first bell to wait by her locker. He couldn’t wait another second.

He’d only been there a few minutes when Eva, surprised to see him, smiled and said, “Hey.” She was wearing her winter outfit of a thrift-store duster and floppy black stocking cap, no makeup, no painted fingernails.

“Hey,” Prager said. “I just want you to know I’m ready now.”

Eva looked at him, a little puzzled. “OK. Ready for what?”

“You want to go on another culinary adventure this Friday?”

She looked at him for what felt like thirty seconds, and then down at the floor, and then back at him.

“I’m moving,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. With each second that her words, and everything they meant, were hanging in the air, threatening to be true, he started to feel like she was taking the school apart brick by brick and throwing the bricks at his heart. “When?”

“This weekend.”

Prager could feel he was losing all ability to remain composed in the face of these words, but his mouth kept trying. “Where?” he asked.

She looked at the ground and continued talking. “Maureen moved to a restaurant in the Cities and she can get me a full-time job there.”

“Full-time job,” was all he could say.

“Well, my dad lost his job here and can’t find a new one, so it’s kind of my family’s best option.”

“So what high school are you going to?” He surprised himself at summoning such a long, coherent sentence.

“I figure I’ll get a GED. I don’t need to waste my time in high school anyway, it’s not like I want to go to college or something. No offense if you do.”

“Oh,” he said. It sounded nuts to him. Who didn’t go to college? The nonsense of this idea emboldened him a little. “So you’re just going to be a chef in a restaurant.”

She didn’t seem to respond. He noticed just then that she wasn’t taking out her books and materials for one class, but rather was emptying out her entire locker into her backpack.

“It was illuminating, Will Prager,” she said, looking at him. “I think of our steamy night on a steamboat often.”

“You do?” he asked. She nodded.

“Well,” she said. “Later.”

He watched her pull the heavy black backpack over her shoulders and walk down the hall, her smooth brown hair and black stocking cap drawing his stare until the very end, until she turned a corner toward the exit, when old Mrs. Colwell, who’d just exited her freshman English classroom, turned and stared at him, forcing Prager to glance away. When he looked again at the space where Eva last was, she was gone.

He needed to get out too, right now, but he couldn’t leave by the same doors. Head down, he walked to the other end of the hall and left, pushing through a busload of underclassmen who were no doubt staring at his red eyes filling with tears.

Prager made it outside, face and body in the cool, clammy, forty-degree late autumn air, and kept walking across the grass and soft
brown leaves and concrete, and was off school grounds for almost half a block, passing a squat yellow house with an American flag out front, before he realized that he, unlike Eva Thorvald, had left the building for no real purpose, and had nowhere to go, and nowhere else to be in the world besides the place he just left.

He turned back toward the school, thought of the lyrics to “Reason to Believe”—the Tim Hardin song made famous by Rod Stewart—and stood there, waiting in the cold for his feet to move, and sooner or later they did.

W
hile parked down the street from her boyfriend Mitch’s town house, waiting for his wife’s car to pull out of the garage and leave for work, Octavia Kincade stared at the plastic pink flamingos sticking out of the snow in his neighbor’s yard and had what her former therapist would’ve called a moment of clarity. It was all Eva Thorvald’s fault, she realized.

All of it. Not just the fact that she was freezing to death in a godawful Pontiac Aztek with a busted heater, but her frustrating lack of commitment from former Bar Garroxta executive chef Mitch Diego, her two kids with Adam Snelling, her marriage to Adam Snelling, the breakup of the Sunday Night Dinner Party, even what happened to Lacey Dietsch—Eva’s presence had set all of this in motion. As she awaited the text from Mitch’s second cell phone, which he used just for her, she looked through her frosty windshield at the snow falling for the second time that April and, like those stupid ironic flamingos, felt imprisoned by the cruelty of circumstances beyond her control.

It wasn’t any colder outside the car, so she figured she would maybe wait outside, maybe even lie down in the snow by the flamingos without her jacket on. Was it possible to die of hypothermia in April? Probably, if it was still below freezing out. Maybe she would be the first. As she lay down in the clammy snow, and felt it soak the back of her jeans and wool sweater and hair that she’d just spent over twenty minutes on, she was sure that whether she survived or not, it would send that bastard a message:
Look at what you drove me to do.

 • • • 

Five years ago, Octavia would have known better. For starters, she should’ve known not to extend a warm, welcoming hand to a helpless creature like Eva Thorvald. But Octavia was a nice person with a big, generous heart who felt sorry for outsiders and tried to help them. And people like her never get any thanks for their selflessness. They are not the ones with the hardness to make others wait; they are the ones left waiting, until their souls are broken like old bread and scattered in the snow for the birds. They can go right ahead and aspire to the stars, but the only chance they’ll ever have to fly is in a thousand pieces, melting in the hot guts of something predatory.

 • • • 

It was the last July weekend of 2009, in the deep sticky bulge of summer, and Robbe was having some people over at the house near Lake Calhoun that he’d bought on a short sale and then exhaustively modernized. The kitchen was outfitted with marble countertops, a center island, two recessed refrigerators—each with a glass door—a hatch in the floor that led to the basement wine cellar, and a painfully tasteful version of every necessary or desired piece of kitchen hardware.

Octavia, who was twenty-six at the time, didn’t know anyone else around her age with such a pimped-out kitchen, but Robbe Kramer was unusual among her friends. He was twenty-nine, shaved his face every day, and had graduated from Carleton back in 2002, the perfect time to join a mortgage loan firm and start slinging subprimes to the masses like pancakes at a charity breakfast. She didn’t know him back then, and had a hard time believing that the collection of Châteauneuf-du-Papes beneath her feet were purchased on the backs of foreclosed blue-collar families and fixed-income seniors. She asked him about it once, in those terms. He just replied, “Were you there?” and looked at her as if she’d just flipped off a mall Santa in front of the children.

By 2009, that revenue model no longer existed, of course, but Robbe had already cashed out. While he watched his bosses get taken to court, he got a Realtor’s license, took cooking classes, and sold the treatment for a memoir called
An ARM and a Leg: One Young Man’s Ride on the Bubble
.

 • • • 

Robbe’s life and home were truly impressive, but she wasn’t going to embarrass herself gushing over every little magnetic knife rack or hobnailed sand iron tetsubin. When Octavia first walked into the kitchen, Robbe was literally explaining a pressure cooker to a young, gawky tower of a girl, and she was acting shamelessly super interested, as if she’d never ever seen a pressure cooker before and Robbe was the genius who invented it. Women look their stupidest when they have a crush on a guy who’s out of their league, and Octavia suspected that was what she was seeing.

“Hi, I’m Eva,” the tall girl said when she noticed Octavia watching her. Upon closer inspection, Eva was big, in both the right and wrong places—not fat, per se, but proportionately large, awkwardly assembled on a towering frame. Her awful white T-shirt and cargo pants were a nonstarter, but the subtle lipstick, chipped nail polish, and messy long hair all vaguely evoked something more feminine than Eva might have intended; she was obviously careless and unrefined, but even then, one could see the potential. She reminded Octavia of a Greek statue in progress, before all the extra marble had been chipped away.

“Hi, I’m Octavia,” she said, arm outstretched as she angled around the center island. Octavia liked to be the prettiest woman in the room whenever possible, and it was no contest here. Especially when she was wearing her canary yellow Betsey Johnson swing dress (she was one of the few women she knew who could truly pull off canary yellow), her gold and lapis lazuli earrings, an ethnic-inspired, chunky coiled snake bracelet, and two big, showstopping lapis lazuli cocktail rings, one on each middle finger.

Robbe asserted himself between them. “Octavia’s a fixture at the Sunday dinners I was telling you about.”

“Cool beans!” Eva said. That kind of enthusiasm was grating, but Eva was probably still young enough to correct it later. “What do you make?”

“Oh, nothing crazy, a little of this, a little of that,” Octavia said.

“She’s dissembling,” Robbe said. “She makes, let’s call them, sexy versions of old-school comfort food. Remind me what they were, I don’t remember.”

Octavia said, “Black truffle oil mac and cheese with bacon and smoked gouda. Gnocchi gratin with pecorino cheese. Walleye casserole with homemade cream of mushroom soup.”

“Real cool,” Eva said.

Robbe looked at Octavia as he nudged Eva with his elbow. “This one works in the kitchen at Bar Garrotxa.”

Octavia was actually impressed. BG, as everyone called it, was the hottest tapas bar in the Cities. Anderson Cooper had recently been spotted eating there. Joe Biden brought his party there after an afternoon fund-raiser in 2008. And several of the most influential local food blogs had ranked it among the best in Minneapolis/Minnesota/the Midwest. All of this conspired to make its dashing executive chef into a budding star, and what this gawky work in progress was doing there made Octavia mighty curious.

“You work for Mitch Diego?” she asked Eva.

“With him, yes.”

“And how old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I just turned twenty.”

“Wow, you’re a baby,” Octavia said. That explained a lot. Now Octavia wondered if she should just feel sorry for her. “What exactly do you do there?”

“I’m a sous-chef. For now.”

For now
. Octavia couldn’t believe the little ingénue. Like anyone her age could possibly do better. “Well, what an impressive place to work,” she said. “What’s he like as a person?”

“Mitch? He’s OK.”

“That’s all? He’s OK?”

Eva shrugged. “When he’s in the kitchen, he just kind of puts the finishing touches on everything. I don’t talk to him that much.”

“But to work with his food every day. You must love everything on the menu.”

“Given the ingredients, it’s all right. I do my best to help it along.”

Damn.
Given the ingredients, it’s all right
? If she’d said that in front of Mitch, Octavia believed, Eva would never even boil pasta in this town again. Baby girl needed to get spanked, big time. “Well,” Octavia said, “I’m sure he appreciates whatever it is you do.”

 • • • 

Octavia sat in Robbe’s lush backyard, in a Crate & Barrel deck chair next to Robbe’s Honeycrisp apple tree, while her bitchy, judgmental ex-roommate Maureen O’Brien smoked a cigarette and ashed it onto the lawn.
Christ,
Octavia thought. Why did Robbe still invite Maureen to his parties? Because she worked at a cool restaurant? Because he wanted his parties to look busier? It couldn’t be because he actually liked her. It was too bad Maureen wasn’t a lesbian, with the buzz cut and the truck driver paunch and the sirloin-thick hands. She even held her cigarettes down at waist level, palm downward, like a dude, instead of arching her elbow and wrist, palm toward the sky, cigarette tip pointed downward, like a woman of a refined caste.

“So what’s your friend’s deal?” Octavia asked. “She’s inside forcing Robbe to explain every single item in his kitchen. I hope to God she doesn’t
like
him.”

“Eva’s awesome,” Maureen said, not looking at Octavia. “Leave her alone.”

“How’d you meet someone so young and relevant?”

“We worked together at the Steamboat before it closed,” Maureen said.

“Why’d they close? Breaking child labor laws?”

Maureen sucked on her cigarette and blew its plume toward the ground. “That chick has the most sophisticated palate I’ve ever seen.”

“But can she cook?”

Maureen looked down at Octavia and extinguished her cigarette against the side of the apple tree. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

 • • • 

A few days later, when Octavia saw that Robbe had added a seventh e-mail address, Eva Thorvald’s, to the Sunday Night Dinner Party e-mail chain, she felt that she’d have to bring her A game to show the newcomer what’s what. On Wednesday, when everyone had to disclose what they were making, Octavia waited for everyone else to chime in before making her announcement.

Robbe: Open-face Kobe beef sliders. Chipotle mayo.

Sarah Vang: Termites on a log (hemp seeds on hummus on celery)

Lacey Dietsch: Jell-O salad! J

Adam Snelling: Corsican-style Paris-Brest

Eva Thorvald: Caesar salad

Elodie Pickett: Cabernet Sauvignon (Walla Walla) [for sliders]; Sauternes (France) [for Paris-Brest]; Vermentino (Sardinia) [for Caesar salad]

Octavia: My famous summer heirloom tomato casserole, bitches!

Elodie (me again): Sangiovese (Umbria) [for tomato hot dish]

 • • • 

They’d only been doing the Sunday Night Dinner Party every other Sunday for three months, but this was looking like a typical menu. The idea was, everyone was supposed to put a new twist on a familiar item, but the only people who consistently did that were Octavia and Sarah Vang, who usually brought something cheaper and easier to
make than what Octavia brought. Robbe came up with the idea for the theme but routinely ignored it, instead just making whatever he wanted to eat. Adam, who worked at a bakery in Lyndale, always only brought bread, and Elodie, the aspiring sommelier, came through with wine pairings.

There were a few problems with Octavia’s high school friend Lacey Dietsch. First of all, she was the mother of a newborn—a little bald, bug-eyed girl named Emma—that she brought to all of the meals, strapped to her chest like a parasitic twin. If Octavia had known in advance that Lacey would insist on being with this creature all of the time, not once leaving the baby home with her husband, she’d never have extended the invite. No one else at the Sunday Night Dinner Party had kids or was even married.

Also, Lacey either didn’t get the spirit of the theme or outright ignored it, bringing cloying, straight-up comfort food right out of a Lutheran grandma’s cookbook. She was first invited in March, after Octavia noticed on social media that she was working as a part-time server at Hutmacher’s, an old-school, old-money bistro on Lake Minnetonka, close to where they grew up. It was sad to confirm that a person could work at Hutmacher’s and have none of the class or talent in its kitchen rub off on them at all, but Octavia liked her—they were on the volleyball team together back in the day—and held out hope that Lacey would one day bring something competent or edible. The following Sunday Night Dinner Party, as it turned out, would not be that day.

 • • • 

“Hey guys!” Lacey said, her naturally curly red hair glowing in the evening’s golden hour, the sunlight bedazzling the red cellophane over a glass bowl of wobbling green strangeness. Lacey was a glow of color and happiness that no one besides her husband ever wanted. She was upbeat and harmless as an educational toy, and it was never insincere—in fact, she was a one-woman plague of sincerity, the Patient Zero of
earnest zeal. Though one could imagine it might have helped her career as a waitress, in social situations her personality made you hate the world and hate life.

“I brought Jell-O!” Lacey said. “With shredded carrots on the top!”

“And that’s a new twist on comfort food how?” Octavia asked.

Lacey shrugged. “It’s comfort food, with carrots,” she said, and brought it into the kitchen.

Robbe, dressed in skinny jeans and a black polo shirt with a popped collar, which all somehow worked for him, smiled at Octavia as he brought them each a Pimm’s cup with muddled cucumber.

“Hey, good news,” he said. “An old business associate of mine just bought investment property in Bali. Seems like a good place to hole up and pound out the memoir, you know?”