Kitchens of the Great Midwest (31 page)

Pat grabbed the handle with her left hand and took care to roll the window down calmly.

“License and registration,” the cop said, his white teeth shining.

“They’re right here in my purse,” she said, in acceptance of what was meant to be. She held the zipper in her fingers, opened her eyes against the white light, and felt herself, a wretch misshapen by desire, submit to the mercy of her Lord.

A
bout once a month in the tasting room, a customer would ask Cindy how to make wine out of supermarket grapes. Sometimes these people were misguided hands-on types, but more often they were cheapos who came in with coupons for two free tastings and left without buying anything. Either way, she had to correct them; wine is created when the sugar in a grape breaks down into alcohol, she’d say, and a supermarket grape has a fraction of the sugar required.

If it was close to harvest and she liked the customers, she’d take them outside to the vineyard and let them eat a Merlot grape off the vine, watching their faces as they swirled the seed-plump sugar bomb in their mouths. Can’t buy that in a store, she’d say.

 • • • 

By Labor Day, the Merlot in the vineyard had a Brix of 23, and in her opinion was ready to be harvested. It was always the first harvest of the year—the Cabs, Zinfandels, and Petite Syrahs came much later—and Cindy loved it. Other vineyards waited on their Merlot, harvesting it at 26 or 27 to make big, jammy, alcoholic varietals, and although these were popular, to her they lacked the nuance and the restraint of a grape that leaves its vine a little early. She also felt that it was a little easier on the vine, not stressing itself out and yielding its vanishing October nutrients into desiccating grapes, even though stressed vines often lead to wonderful wines.

 • • • 

On September 5, the first day of the Merlot harvest at Tettegouche Vineyards that year, Cindy was stuck in the tasting room. Denisse Ramirez, the sales and wine club manager, who would normally handle the tasting room by herself during the harvest, was out sick, and the job fell to Cindy, the most recent hire. She had said when she came aboard as combination sales manager and associate winemaker that she would do her part to help make another unknown operation famous, just as she had with Daniel Anthony Vineyards and Solomon Creek Winery. Whatever that entailed.

She wiped down the long black marble counter and set a single bronze spit bucket in the center, because she didn’t want to have to clean more than one. She removed the glasses from the dishwasher and fit wine aerators on the freshly opened bottles for today’s flight and set them in a row.

The first customers of the day were a couple who arrived right when Tettegouche opened at eleven. The woman was a young hipster princess, with bangs, a patterned sundress, and cat-eye glasses. The man was an odd match for her; he looked like someone’s idea of a sportswriter, with an unshaven face, a blue baseball cap, blue jeans, and a long-sleeved checkered shirt rolled up to his elbows. He looked at least ten years older than his companion.

“Two tastings,” the man said, removing a Two Free Tastings coupon from his back pocket. Even if new wineries needed these tacky things, Christ, she despised them.

“IDs, please,” Cindy said, looking at the man. “Just hers, I don’t need yours.”

 • • • 

“We’ll start you off with the Sauvignon Blanc,” she said, getting straight to it, pouring one ounce each into two stemless Riedel glasses.

“That’s OK,” the man said, waving Cindy off. “The Bordeaux whites around here have too much malo.” He was using winespeak for
malolactic fermentation, a process by which tart malic acids in red wine (and some whites) become soft, sometimes buttery lactic acids.

“Perfectly fine,” Cindy said, pouring his glass into the bucket on the counter. “Next up would be the Chardonnay.”

Over the last two decades, Cindy had met thousands of male wine snobs trying to impress their girlfriends while on a sex trip to wine country. The polite thing in these cases was to be quiet and go ahead and let the guy play the expert to the woman; men really got off on that. But watching this couple now dump out most of her Chardonnay, Cindy didn’t feel polite.

“Not a fan of our ninety-two-point Chardonnay, kids?” Cindy asked, to be mean. Not only had the Chardonnay not received ninety-two points from anyone, but none of their wines had received any score from any wine critic, anywhere.

“No, I loved it,” the woman said. “It was delicious. It’s just we have six places to go to today and we gotta pace ourselves.”

“Oh, live a little,” Cindy said.

“Wish we could,” the woman said.

It occurred to Cindy that when she was around this chick’s age, she was doing exactly the same thing, flitting into half a dozen wineries a day with a man ten years older, acting smarter than the wine pourers, but actually swallowing the wine, never spitting it out. What idiots they had been. It was a miracle they had survived, all the times they drove around absolutely shitfaced, windows down, screaming out the sunroof.

 • • • 

She’d left Jeremy St. George six weeks after they got to Australia in 1989. He was threatened by her burgeoning expertise; when she correctly guessed the year and vintner of a particular Australian Pinot one evening, and he didn’t, and his reaction was to call her a “stupid lucky bitch” in front of everyone—well, that was all she needed to hear.

Months later, she turned down a chance to see him off when he moved to Tokyo. She figured that he would be sufficiently put off by the
snub never to get in touch with her again, which was how things played out. Since then, he seldom came to mind; she’d thought of him only when she’d made certain mistakes with men in her unmarried years, and the Napa Cabs and Central Coast Pinots he introduced her to had their sentimental associations smudged away after years of repeated exposure.

Still, he had been a charismatic, talented scoundrel who almost certainly was on to a new woman after a week in Japan; there was nothing to long for or feel sorry for. Wherever Jeremy was in the world, she was sure he was fine.

 • • • 

“Of the seven you’re visiting today, what’s the highlight?” Cindy asked.

“Besides Tettegouche?” the woman asked, pronouncing it
tet-goosh-AY
.

“Tet-uh-goosh,” Cindy said.

The man leaned forward. “Well, the main reason we’re up here is to pick up an order from Saxum.”

“Oh, very nice,” Cindy said. “How did you hear about them?”

“Eva Thorvald just served Saxum’s Terry Hoage GSM at one of her pop-up supper clubs up in Minnesota.”

“We read about it in the
New Yorker
,” the woman said.

“Oh,” Cindy said, and felt herself back away from the counter.

The young woman kept talking.

 • • • 

That name.

 • • • 

She hadn’t heard that name in twenty-four years.

 • • • 

It would’ve been nice to say that Cindy never went a day without thinking of her daughter, but the truth was, most days, she just didn’t.

 • • • 

Still, sometimes an otherwise calm afternoon would be accosted by a song from the late 1980s, a menu item at some luckless bistro, the sight of a bald man pushing a stroller, or something as brutally common as the faces of girls, and later women, who would have been her daughter’s age.

 • • • 

Now that the name had been actually spoken to her, she felt herself freeze in place, immobilized by the feeling that any movement at all would somehow give her away.

The man and the young woman stared at her, smiling mildly, like they were just waiting for her to respond, but she sensed that they knew everything, just from the way she was standing.

“You don’t know her?” the man asked. “She runs a pop-up supper club called The Dinner.”

Cindy’s palms were sweating; she moved her hands behind her back and gripped her left wrist. “Have you been there?” she asked.

The woman shook her head. “We wish. We’ve already spent a year on the waiting list.”

“Why?”

“Well, she only does it four or five times a year. Always in a different place. One time it was on the edge of a cliff, and the guests had to rappel down the side for the main course. Once, it was in a boat that was rigged in place at the edge of a waterfall.”

The man smirked. “Our friend Kermit was going to live-tweet that one but they didn’t let him.”

“Yeah. They take away everyone’s phones and don’t give them back until they leave.”

“How’s the food?” Cindy asked.

“I hear it’s indescribable,” the woman said.

“Everyone says it’s the best meal they’ve ever had,” the man said.
“Our only hope is that she picks randomly across both her priority and regular waiting lists.”

The woman frowned. “It’s not random. She tries for variety.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” the man said. “She doesn’t want, like, twelve investment bankers.”

The woman pointed to the Merlot bottle. “Is that next? We have to keep moving here.”

“Oh, yes, sorry,” Cindy said, pouring three ounces in each of their glasses.

In ten minutes, the man and woman zipped through the rest of the tasting, and then left without buying anything.

 • • • 

She never saw them again, never got their names or learned where they were from. Before they had even reached their car, a white BMW, Cindy had turned the sign in the window to
CLOSED
, locked the door, dashed to the desktop PC in the office, and, for the first time in her life, entered “Eva Thorvald” into Google.

Her memory of her daughter’s face, from a time when she still went by Cynthia, had been thickly bundled for its quiet passage through unmarked time. Without a photograph, Cindy’s image of Eva was that of an increasingly vague, featureless infant, and she had no apprehension of how that baby might have matured. She set her shaking fingers on the keyboard, pressed a button, and in a bright, savage instant split all of this open.

Eva had her dad’s broad shoulders and big smile. And her mom’s eyes, nose, and cheekbones. That was her, that was her baby, all grown up, fierce and beautiful and unknown.

She didn’t know this person, she told herself, but while staring at her image, Cindy’s eyes fattened with tears. This was why she had avoided ever doing this before; she was deeply afraid it would upset her, even though she never regretted leaving for a moment, not once. She hadn’t
even cried on the day she left, she was so confident that she and her daughter would be better off without each other.

 • • • 

And Cindy still honestly believed there was no way she could’ve been a good mother. She was thrilled, not nostalgic, never to have to go down the diaper aisle again or purée food every day or deal with literal piles of shit in clothes, on bedsheets, on carpeted floors. And frankly, the idea of even living with a teenage girl made Cindy want to jump in front of a wine tour Humvee. Teenagers were her least favorite people on the face of the earth, and she never could’ve lived with a bratty teen princess without appalling amounts of Xanax and fat bowls of Northern Lights. But looking at Eva, the adult, she felt something grappling with her insides.

She wiped her face and stared at the blue and black words on the white screen: “Eva Thorvald, America’s bad-girl chef.” “Controversial chef Eva Thorvald keeps diners guessing.” “Thorvald’s table the toughest to get in USA.”

The reviews of Eva’s food were astonishing: “Thorvald’s five-thousand-dollar dinner a total-body experience.” “A once-in-a-lifetime necessity for serious and adventurous diners.” Cindy couldn’t tell if the critics were trying to justify the ridiculous price—five thousand dollars for five courses—or if all this, at last, was true.

Eva was an amazingly successful chef; that was clear. Lars must be so proud. His love alone must’ve cultivated her skills and inspired the confidence needed for this level of achievement. Cindy read no mention of him, but certainly he was there, behind the scenes, perhaps running her hot line or at least plating dishes. It’d be like him to stay out of the spotlight.

Maybe if she’d been a foodie, Cindy would have heard of her daughter much earlier. She’d tried cooking around the time she met Lars, but making a great meal was too much work, and when she got into wine, it was game over for everything else. Food was best if it was easy, and with Reynaldo, her current husband, she finally had a guy who loved so-called
guilty pleasure food as much as she did. She went to the gym every day, so there was nothing to feel guilty about anyway.

 • • • 

Cindy spent another twenty minutes entering various search queries into Google. She found no bio, no address, no interviews, no mention of a husband or children, no Facebook page; just private Instagram and Twitter accounts, several fan sites, and, of course, the reservations page for The Dinner.

The text on the Web site was stark: sixty dollars nonrefundable for priority VIP list, twenty dollars nonrefundable for nonpriority list. Cindy checked the regular list first. The next slot was number 2364, estimated wait time: 295 years.

The priority VIP list was taken through slot number 194, estimated wait time: four years. Not that she really had a choice, but if she was ever going to see her daughter, she wanted to do it from a distance, as part of a public, professional relationship, before there might be a personal one. Four years seemed like a long time to wait, but it had already been twenty-four. And in a way, it was good, because she needed time to prepare mentally. Whatever uncertainties afflicted the intervening years, one monumental event now seemed likely. She would, one day, see her daughter again.