Kitchens of the Great Midwest (4 page)

“Yeah, sure, it’d be nice to park on the property there.”

“That’s what we were thinking—you know, me and Nick. We thought, who deserves it? And your name came right up, so.”

“So yeah, is that it, then?”

“Yeah, pretty much, I guess. But I thought, maybe you’d want to know, the reason the spot opened up is because Jeremy St. George tendered his resignation today, effective immediately. So, you can have his spot when you come in this afternoon already.”

“You heard from Jeremy St. George?”

“Yep, he called us from the airport, and said he was quitting, so.”

“What did he say about Cynthia? Did he say anything about Cynthia? She’s with him, you know.”

“Oh, I figured she talked to you. Well, we asked, we did ask, and he said that she had her own decision to make, so I guess we’ll see. We’ll see on that. Oh, I got a call on the other line. Can you hold, please?”

“No, that’s all right,” Lars said. He hung up the phone and stared out into the living room at his daughter, who was lying on her back, sucking on an egg separator, as her uncle tried to make her smile.

 • • • 

Three days later, Lars opened his lobby mailbox to a letter, postmarked San Francisco. He saw the swoops and curls of the hand behind the blue pen that had written their address, and he tore open the envelope right there.

My Dear Lars,

I don’t know how to say this. I suppose I should’ve called, but every time I picked up the phone and started to dial our number, I started to cry. Plus I knew you would try to talk me out of this, and at this point, you can’t. Since I last saw you five weeks ago, I’ve had experiences and made choices that would make it impossible for me to return to you with a whole heart. You could argue for me to come back, but the person you want no longer exists, and maybe never did.

You are the best father the world has ever seen. But I wasn’t cut out to be a mother. The work of being a mom feels like prison to me. I know this might sound horribly selfish to you, but out here in California, I found a sense of happiness that I haven’t felt since before I was pregnant. If you truly want me to be happy, you must try to understand this. I will never be happy being a mother. Having a child was the biggest mistake of my life and I honestly believe that our daughter will be better off having no mother instead of a bad one.

I’m leaving today for Australia or New Zealand. I haven’t decided which yet, but by the time you read this, I’ll be in that part of the world. You’re free to keep, give away, or throw away anything of mine I’ve left behind. Don’t try to send anything to me and please don’t come looking for me.

A lawyer will be serving you with divorce papers. I’m giving you full custody of our child and complete ownership of our shared property. Please sign it as written. Otherwise, it will only lengthen the process, because I will not return to the U.S. for any reason, perhaps for a very long time.

Maybe it won’t seem like it to you, but the reason I have to make such a clean break is because this is absolutely heartbreaking to me. I love you so much and I will think of you every day for the rest of
my life. You have made me a better person, a person brave enough to know what she is and what she is not.

I am so sorry to put you through this. I didn’t mean to lose you. But you are just so passionate about being a father, I feel that the kindest thing I can do is to free you from our marriage so you can find a woman who’s equally committed to being a mother. I know she’s out there for you. You’re an incredible guy, the kindest man I’ve ever met, and any woman would be lucky to have you. I want you to actually have the life, and the family, you thought you had with me. If I come back to you, you will not have that.

I have to go. I will miss you so, so much.

All my love, forever,

Cynthia

 • • • 

Lars unlocked the front door of his quiet apartment. He’d intended to just leave Eva alone for a moment while he checked the mail. She was still sleeping on a blanket in the middle of the living room floor, as if he’d never left, and what he’d found in the mailbox never existed. He walked the letter into the kitchen, softly opening a child-locked drawer under the counter. His daughter should never see this letter or know the words inside it, he decided, so he would burn it, right now, in the sink, but now he couldn’t find his butane BBQ lighter. Or even his crème brûlée torch. He wanted to burn the letter now, so that maybe all of the bad thoughts would be burned along with it.

He heard his daughter stir and start to cry. He ignited a gas burner on his stove and held the letter to the flame. It caught fire so fast that he dropped it on the kitchen floor and watched it whisper out on the brown vinyl.

His daughter started to wail.

“Just a minute,” he called out. He picked up what was left of the letter and held it to the gas flame, leaving it on the burner this time. He watched as it caught fire and curled, and once it was aflame, the heat lifted it into the air and dropped it perfectly into the crack between the stove and the kitchen counter.

“Shit,” he said. He picked up a coffee mug full of tepid water in the sink and dumped it into the crack, onto the irretrievable, smoldering envelope.

Satisfied that the kitchen wouldn’t catch on fire, he ran into the living room to lift his daughter into his arms. She would never hear that she was a mistake, he decided. She would never read a letter in which her mother abandoned her without even saying
I love you
. In fact, she would never even hear a bad word about her mother, not one—at least not from him—as long as he lived. What he would tell her instead, he hadn’t yet decided, but now was not the time to think about such things. Now was the time to sit with his little family of two people, and cry.

 • • • 

Jarl lifted his brown necktie and yellow polyester shirt and scratched his hairy gut. “What do you mean she left for Australia because you’re fat and ugly?”

Fiona, sitting next to Jarl at Lars’s kitchen counter, put her hand over her thick, cherry-lipsticked mouth. “Oh my God,” she said, her eyes bulging beneath fake eyebrows that looked like cartoon mountains. “I’m so sorry, Lars.” She got up and hugged him. It occurred to Lars just then that he hadn’t been touched by a woman in several weeks. It felt disorienting, like waking up from a car nap, but her sweet, lumpy, perfumed body next to his was comforting.

Jarl took a sip of his Grain Belt Premium. “This is where you’re supposed to say he’s not fat and ugly, Fiona.”

“But I am fat and ugly,” Lars said. “I’ve never looked worse in my life.”

“We need to get you in shape. It’s what I’ve been saying,” Jarl said. He turned to Fiona. “It’s what I’ve been telling him.”

Lars shrugged and lifted his beer, but Jarl grabbed it from him before he could raise it to his mouth.

“Let’s start right here,” Jarl said. “No more beer.”

“You brought it over.”

“I can’t believe a mother could just abandon her child like that,” Fiona said. “She can’t be serious.”

“She didn’t abandon our daughter,” Lars said. “She was very clear about that. She abandoned me. I wasn’t making enough. I let myself go physically. It’s all on me.”

“When she comes back,” Fiona said, “maybe we can knock some sense into her then.”

Jarl nodded. “And drag that Jeremy St. George behind a car, that’s what I’d like to do. He seduced her, I bet. I bet you it was all his idea.”

“We’re going to leave them alone, Jarl,” Lars said. “I gotta get on with my life.”

“That tall skinny bitch,” Fiona said.

“Please,” Lars said. “Don’t ever talk about her like that, especially around my daughter.”

Jarl looked over his shoulder. “She’s sleeping.”

“I mean, ever. All right?”

“But she did a terrible thing to your family,” Jarl said.

“Maybe her mother did a bad thing to me,” Lars said. “But not to Eva.”

“But she abandoned her.”

“Her mother loves her very much,” Lars said. “She just has to find her own way in life.”

“That’s so selfish,” Fiona said. “Forget her. She’s dead to me.”

Lars leaned forward across the counter. “What’s more selfish? Working a job you hate just to come home and be an exhausted, frustrated, unhappy mom? Or following your dreams and becoming a successful woman that our daughter could feel proud of?”

“I think a baby wants to be with its mom,” Fiona said. “And the mom should want to be with her baby.”

“What if the mom doesn’t want to be with me?” Lars said.

“I agree with Fiona,” Jarl said. “Screw her.”

“Yep, screw her,” Fiona said. “And I mean the other word, by the way.”

“Oh, and besides,” Jarl said, “Fiona has a ton of single lady friends. They’re younger than you, mostly, but some of them are super cute. And they wouldn’t mind a bald guy, right?”

Fiona shook her head. “Just whenever you’re ready.”

Lars nodded.

Fiona turned to Jarl. “Which ones do you think are super cute?”

Jarl ignored her and sipped his beer. “So, can we stay here tonight, or should we take her back to our place?”

“Whatever you want.”

“And, uh, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Jarl said, standing up. “Maybe now’s not the best time to bring this up, but, I was actually wondering, because she sleeps in your room every night, and there’s that empty room—we could move in for a while, split the rent with you.”

Fiona nodded. “It would really help.”

At the time, Lars didn’t want to admit that he might have needed them even more, so in his classic Lars way, he just told them he’d think about it, and he walked to his room to get dressed for work. As he buttoned his white shirt, he was already thinking where he’d move furniture around, already thinking about the good and the bad and the deep human necessity of it all, and how anybody ever got anything done without family, and how someone could give that up in the amount of time it takes to seal an envelope, with the same saliva once used to seal a marriage.

 • • • 

Christmas is only exciting when there’s a child in the middle of it, and it’s lovely and sad how three adults with about one and a half jobs between them will pile presents under a tree for a six-month-old baby. Fiona was particularly intent on getting little Eva up to date with some
modern fashions, such as baby leggings, a My Little Pony onesie, and some pink Stride Rite shoes.

The adults didn’t have wish lists, but Lars was working on a surprise for Jarl. He absolutely didn’t want to make it himself, but he had a lead on a butcher down south of the Cities who apparently sold the freshest lutefisk in the metro area, at some old family-owned shop that had been in operation for eighty years. While he was at work, Lars would make the accompanying cream sauce—which softens lutefisk from being a hostile sensory assault to merely a disgusting one—and he would surprise Jarl with the whole shebang as a big practical joke on Christmas Eve night.

 • • • 

There was a lot to think about on Christmas Eve. The restaurant was closed, thank goodness, because Lars had planned a five-course meal for Eva, Lars, Jarl, Fiona, and the four people who would drive up from West Des Moines: Fiona’s sister Amy Jo, Amy Jo’s art professor husband, Wojtek, and their kids, Rothko and Braque. Wojtek and Amy Jo were really into food and culture, or so Lars was told. They were attracted to the idea of having their Christmas Eve dinner prepared by a professional chef; that seemed to be Fiona’s selling point. Lars hadn’t met them yet, but being that they were driving so far out of their way and staying the night in a hotel, he felt inspired to pull out all the stops—pork shoulder, winter squash, venison meatballs, wild rice salad, crème brûlée, and, of course, the surprise for Jarl.

It was ten in the morning, and Lars was just about to make the drive to the old butcher shop to acquire the key ingredient for the surprise when Amy Jo and Wojtek Dragelski’s Mazda 626 pulled into a guest parking space outside. Lars watched from his living room window as the family, who must’ve left Iowa around 6:00 a.m. to arrive here so early, trudged through the snow toward the lobby of his building.

“They’re here, Fiona,” Lars called out to his brother’s fiancée. Fiona
and Jarl had gotten engaged a few weeks before, on Black Friday. Jarl thought they could get a better deal on rings that way.

Fiona set down her magazine and leapt from the sofa; he’d never seen her move so quickly. “Let’s go down and greet them at the door,” she said, already putting her shoes on.

The Dragelskis looked like one of those odd families where, but for some vague physical resemblances, no two people looked like they belonged together. Amy Jo, the mother, had the dress and demeanor of a museum docent; Fiona had described her older sister as “fancy” and “uptight”—surely she was the one to rouse a family before dawn for a four-hour drive in the dead of winter. Wojtek, the father, had a full black beard, wore a brown leather jacket over his thick torso, and the tired, glazed-over face of a man on autopilot. The thirteen-year-old son, Rothko, or “Randy,” as he apparently preferred to be called (and who could blame him), had curly rocker hair, a dangling silver earring, steel-toed boots, and a long-sleeved Guns N’ Roses
Appetite for Destruction
shirt. Braque, the eight-year-old daughter, was a tall, stunning blond child in an Iowa Hawkeyes Starter jacket and bright new Nikes.

Lars watched while Fiona hugged them all, some reciprocating more willingly than others. Lars knew by now that Fiona loved her older sister and viewed Amy Jo’s family as a paragon of sophistication. As Lars was introduced to them, he felt as if he was being shown off as an example of how Fiona could be sophisticated as well.

“I need to take a piss,” Randy said, looking down at the skulls on his shirt.

“Randy!” said his mom.

“Well, I do,” Randy said, as if the facts and not the language had been called into question.

The elevator door opened, and Jarl walked out holding Eva with one hand and a Grain Belt Premium in the other. Although she was fast asleep, she cast a spell over the six people in the lobby, in the manner of most infants.