Kitchens of the Great Midwest (6 page)

“Dude,” he said, “you’re gonna get snot all over the eagles!” At a stoplight, he looked around his car for a tissue, which of course he didn’t have, so he leaned over and wiped her face with his black T-shirt. “There,” he said. “You gotta keep the eagles snot-free, or they’re gonna fly somewhere else.” This made Eva laugh a little bit.

“You know what?” Randy said. “I got an idea for those boys.”

“What is it?”

“Gotta make sure they have something in stock first. Just don’t sell Aracely all of your stuff.”

 • • • 

At 3:10 p.m., the restaurant was still about two hours from opening, which was how Randy liked it for their visits. As they passed by the wooden benches and coat racks in the lobby, Eva liked to stop and look at a sepia-toned portrait of the owners, Jack Daugherty and Ishmael Mendoza, and a framed “Story of Lulu’s” that was meant to help pass the time for customers willing to tolerate a substantial wait.

When she owned a restaurant, Eva decided, she was going to have the same thing in her lobby, and in her story, she was going to mention Cousin Randy and Aracely and her cousin Braque, who got a softball scholarship to Northwestern and said that Eva could visit Chicago anytime. But probably nobody else. It wasn’t that she hated her parents or anything—they meant well, she knew that. But Eva just belonged somewhere else, somewhere with real important chefs like Aracely Pimentel, who didn’t make time for stupid friends or stupid social events, and didn’t view those choices as compromises that would ruin your life, like Eva’s mom did.

 • • • 

Aracely was sitting at the bar in her chef whites and striped pants, drinking coffee and reading a magazine, her gray-streaked black hair pulled back into a tight, kitchen-ready bun. Her beautiful makeup-free face emanated the kind of don’t-mess-with-me aura of Secret Service agents and British rock stars, but she was always happy to see Eva.

“Hey!” Aracely said with a wide smile, shoving the magazine into her bag and slapping the barstool next to her for Eva to slide onto. Randy went in for a hug but realized that he had snot all over his shirt just as he saw Aracely’s eyes fall on it.

“Allergies?” Aracely asked him.

“Aw, crap. I’ll be right back,” Randy said, already on his way to the men’s room.

 • • • 

“Let me show you something we had to do because of you,” Aracely said, rising from her stool and walking around the corner to the maître d’s station. Eva was fascinated by the empty bar, with its exotically shaped colored bottles with names like Galliano and Cynar and Midori. Randy had told her that these bottles were full of poison that ruined lives, but they looked so gorgeous, they couldn’t only be evil.

Eva also loved the painted
WALL
OF
FAME
banner opposite the bar, meant for the “survivors” of the “Caliente Combo.” The deal was, if you spent a lot of money, like forty dollars, and ate everything on the Caliente Combo plate—which was a chicken burrito, a cheese enchilada, a chile relleno, two carne asada tacos, and rice and beans, all infused with scant amounts of Eva’s hot peppers—you got a T-shirt and your picture on the Wall of Fame. Eva was told that that Caliente Combo would not exist without her chocolate habaneros. It must’ve been a tough plate for adults to finish because it had been on the menu since her last chile harvest and there were only nine pictures on the wall. The newest one was of a guy named Edgar Caquill, who came all the way from St. Paul, Minnesota. Eva had finished the plate twice—it was a challenge to eat only because of the amount of food, not the spiciness quotient—but the owners hadn’t gotten around to putting her picture on the wall or even giving her a T-shirt yet.

 • • • 

When Aracely returned to the bar, Eva opened a menu and pointed to
Abuelito Matias’s Chimole—PELIGRO! MÁS CALIENTE!

“Why did you add the warnings?”

“People were sending it back,” Aracely said. “Only about one in five customers can finish it. That many Scoville units is really tough on most people.”

Eva’s last batch of chocolate habs was just over 500,000 Scoville heat units, according to Aracely’s friends at the Iowa State Food Science Lab, and that number was unbearable for most people. This new crop Eva estimated at close to double that, giving her chiles a heat index almost halfway to Mace.

“I can do better than five hundred thousand.”

“It’s a lot. I don’t let my cooks handle them without gloves on.”

Eva dug around in her backpack. “I’ve stressed them out even more this year. Why don’t you bring Iowa State some of this stuff?” She held up a glass pint jar a little more than halfway full of a dark brown powder, and a four-ounce bottle filled to its cap with a tannish liquid. “I have more oil at home,” she said. “I just wanted you to give me notes, because it’s the first time I’ve made it through hot infusion, like you told me to.”

Aracely studied the jar. “So what you’re saying is, this stuff is stronger than what we currently use in the chimole?”

“Oh, unequivocally.”

“How much can you sell me?”

“Whoa,” Randy said. “Don’t sell all of it.”

“Why not?” Eva asked. “I have lots of overhead costs. I don’t exactly plant my habaneros in dirt from the backyard, you know. Plus I have to buy my own distilled water and special kinds of nutrients and stuff.”

“I had an idea. Aracely, those churro bites you make, do you have like thirty of ’em I can buy?”

Aracely seemed wary. “What are you going to do?”

“It’s a birthday surprise,” Randy said, with confidence, and then he noticed that Eva had opened the bottle of chocolate habanero chile oil and was applying it to her lips with an eyedropper. “Whoa, hey!” he shouted.

“Hey, I’m fine,” Eva said, the chile oil dripping from her mouth.

“Oh, Christ, no!” Aracely said, and grabbed Eva by the arm.

“I’m fine,” Eva said.

“We gotta get you some dairy,” Aracely said, yanking Eva in the direction of the kitchen. “Oh no, oh no.”

“I’m fine,” Eva repeated, as she disappeared around a corner.

 • • • 

Twenty minutes later, after the adults were calmed down from shock into mere amazement, and even asked Eva to do it again, Randy reminded everyone they had to get her home before her parents got off work.

First, Eva and Randy sat in his Jetta in Lulu’s parking lot with the box of churro bites, the pint jar of chocolate habanero chile powder, and the eyedropper. For ten minutes, they tried to inject a few flecks of the corrosive powder into a piece of churro the size of a Tater Tot without the latter falling apart or leaving an obvious wound. In that amount of time, they got one done decently well and screwed up two beyond repair.

“Recognizing that this was my idea, I raise a practical question at this point,” Randy said. “Do sixth graders even like churro bites?”

“Sure,” Eva said. “Bethany Messerschmidt brought them once. They were as popular as anything that’s basically sugar and fat.”

Randy looked at his dashboard clock. “Crap. Can you finish the other twenty-nine of these at home tonight?”

Eva could see that he felt guilty about leaving her with all of the work. She loved that about him. They were each outcasts in their own way, and even though he was way more fearless and tough than she’d ever be, he looked after her, and she knew nothing bad would ever happen to her if he was around.

 • • • 

The first thing Eva did every day when she got home was go to her closet and make sure that the grow light was still on. Once or twice a year one of the bulbs would go out, which was devastating. Every morning at 6:30, to simulate the long, hot days of tropical climates, Eva turned on the two-foot Hydrofarm fluorescent lamp over her plants, and
kept it on until ten at night. Her parents didn’t like the effect on the electricity bills, but usually only complained, and rarely threatened.

By the time her parents got home from their jobs, Eva was sitting at the dining room table, doing vocabulary homework—the one where they teach you a new word and you have to use it in a sentence. She was writing all of her sentences in iambic pentameter to make it more interesting for herself.

These people didn’t know what to do with someone like her. Her teacher, Mr. Ramazzotti, was a sweetheart, but spent 90 percent of class time managing the five stupidest little bastards in class, who chose to create a battle out of everything, making even something as rote as taking attendance twice as long as it ought to be. Where does that leave someone who wants to have the largest pepper garden in Iowa? Did she really have to wait out seven more soul-shredding years? It was like being told you can run free one day—in June several years from now—but during every second of the intervening time, you’ll be getting run over by the world’s slowest steamroller, and every day it cracks a bone, and recracks it, and recracks it, and when you’re eighteen all you’re going to have is a body full of dust, lifted and carried into the future like a flag loose from its mast.

 • • • 

Eva beat her parents home, thankfully, and even had a birthday package come in the mail from her cousin Braque at Northwestern—a T-shirt of something called “Bikini Kill.” She didn’t know what it was—probably a band? But it was from Braque, so it definitely was cool.

She was finishing the second-to-last sentence of her homework when her mom came home and walked into the dining room, green pantsuit and Hillary hair disheveled from a day doing who knows what at the temp agency, lugging two heavy grocery sacks, dropping them on the floor of the kitchen.

Eva glanced up. “How was work, Mom?”

Fiona was moving milk, butter, and ice cream from the grocery bags to the refrigerator and freezer. “Good, now that it’s over. Here, I picked up some chocolate chip ice cream, and some little pink cups and spoons at the gas station.”

A frosted plastic tub of Blue Bunny ice cream thudded onto the kitchen tile. At least it was a local brand. “Sounds fine, Mom.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get you that organic stuff for your class,” Fiona said. “I know it’s your birthday.”

Eva knew that her mom hadn’t gotten the vegan sorbet because it was too expensive. In their home, cost was the main reason why something good didn’t happen.

Fiona set a small white paper carton of N. W. Gratz brand Vegan Blue-berry Sorbet in front of Eva. “So I just got a little one, just for you.”

Eva couldn’t believe it. Her mom had driven into the city just to get it for her. She sometimes forgot that her parents were actually capable of doing nice things. Too often she could focus only on the horrifyingly unjust occasions when they prevented her from doing stuff, like when they told her that she couldn’t go to the downtown farmers’ market alone until she was ten, and even then didn’t let her go until she was ten and two months. Or their stupid rules regarding Randy.

She reached for the carton, but her mom grabbed it back.

“Tomorrow,” Fiona said. “Save it for your birthday.”

 • • • 

Her dad, Jarl, still in his collared shirt and necktie after his day of work in the mailroom at Pioneer Seeds, grabbed a Busch Light from the door of the fridge.

“Hey, Dad,” Eva said, and Jarl opened his beer as he sat down at the dining room table.

“Blueberry sorbet,” Jarl said to no one in particular. “Is that something you could make at home?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Eva said. “I hadn’t thought of it.”

“How was school?” her mom asked. She was reheating the leftover morning coffee in the microwave; she always did that instead of making a new batch.

“Fine,” Eva said.

“What’d you do after school?”

“Nothing.”

“Did Randy pick you up?”

“Yeah, but he just brought me straight home.”

“Look, I can’t stop you from going to Lulu’s if you want. I personally don’t see what’s so damn special about Randy and that Mexican chef, but I know they’re your favorite people in the world. Not that they buy your food or put a roof over your head or anything.”

“They sure don’t,” her dad said, nodding as he drank his beer.

Eva rested her forehead on the dining room table and shook it back and forth as her mom spoke. “They’re nice people,” she said. “And they like the same stuff I like.”

“Randy didn’t give you cigarettes or weed or anything?”

“No! God, Mom.”

“Well, still, maybe you should take a little break from Randy for a while.”

“But, Mom.”

Jarl picked at the tab of his beer can. “He used to drive while high, you know. That’s how he got busted. He coulda killed somebody. Coulda killed himself.”

“I know that,” Eva said. “He doesn’t drive stoned anymore.”

“Y’know, I don’t think he’s out of the woods yet,” Jarl said. “With his drug problems.”

“How would you know?” Eva said, gathering her homework from the table and bolting off to her room, away from this awful conversation. “You never even talk to him.”

Eva thought maybe she heard Jarl say “I just don’t wanna lose you” at her, before she closed her bedroom door, but she wasn’t sure.

 • • • 

Alone at the too-small child’s desk in her room, Eva finished the last line of the most pointless assignment ever, and though she wanted to start on the evening’s true mission immediately, she kept the box of churro bites closed under her bed. Her parents went to sleep at ten o’clock on weeknights. Only three and a half more hours to wait out.

 • • • 

After a brazenly lifeless dinner of fish sticks and frozen peas, Eva scurried back to her room. Fortunately, neither of her parents had brought up Randy again. If they had, Eva would’ve gotten up from the table that second.

She was sitting on her bed reading recipes in an old copy of James Beard’s
Beard on Bread
—she found that book comforting for some reason—when her dad, smelling like sweat and warm beer, knocked on her door and opened it. He was still wearing a tie, but now also had on sweatpants cut off at the knees. Probably the dorkiest outfit of all time.

“Yes?” Eva asked, looking at her dad’s face as his wide, soft body filled up the doorway.

“How’s it goin’?” Jarl asked. “Is everything OK?”