Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal Read Free Book Online Page B

if you’d kiss her.”
    Chadd left the seat he shared with Eva to climb over to Dylan, attempting to put him in a headlock, and the driver yelled at them.
    That, as she would remember it, was Eva Thorvald’s first kiss with a boy.
     • • • 
    Eva’s mom didn’t know this, but Randy often picked her up after school in his cool black Volkswagen Jetta. He’d roll up to the white curb five minutes before the final bell, blasting Nick Cave or Nine Inch Nails or Tool out of the open windows. He had long dyed black hair, and always wore black T-shirts and ripped jeans and sunglasses, making him look like a scarier Trent Reznor. To Eva and the kids her age, it was a look that spelled
cool
and no one messed with Eva within five hundred feet of this guy.
    The first time Chadd and Brant and Dylan followed her out of the school, Randy just flicked his cigarette to the ground and took a hard step toward them and those little pricks scattered like dropped gumballs. Now they didn’t even leave by the same exit anymore. To Eva, Cousin Randy was an untouchable demigod—an angel’s wing broken from an ancient statue, sent here to help her hover above all things insipid and heartbreaking.
     • • • 
    One morning, after seven years of excessive hydroponic indica intake—and he’d never told Eva why, exactly—he had dumped his final three pounds of weed into the Des Moines River. For her birthday that year,against Fiona’s and Jarl’s initial resistance, he’d bestowed on her his expensive grow lights and gardening hardware. He went to a place called Hazelden, a word Eva remembered from when people suggested her dad should go there after he was fired from the law office back in Minnesota. That kind of place was for people like Randy, people with real serious issues, Eva overheard Jarl say to Fiona once, not for “functional guys” like himself. Eva wondered if that was why Jarl didn’t want to have anything to do with Randy; maybe people who drink look down on people who use drugs, just because drugs are illegal. To Eva, it was like a one-legged person being mean to a no-legged person, and she didn’t understand it.
    In the intervening years, however, with the help of Randy’s gift, Eva had evolved from a slightly tall eight-year-old struggling to grow her first jalapeños in her bedroom window box to a giant almost-eleven-year-old who supplied the city’s most popular Mexican restaurant with the exotic peppers for its signature dishes. She didn’t need her parents to be proud of all this if Randy was, and when she was with him she felt part of something adult and sophisticated. His love for her made her feel like she was wearing sunglasses even when she wasn’t.
    Eva threw her arms around Cousin Randy when she saw him leaning against his car, and she hit him so hard with her embrace that he dropped his unfiltered Marlboro Red on the sidewalk.
    “Oh, shit, dog,” he said, laughing. “Get in, we’re going to Lulu’s.”
    “Yeah,” Eva said, smiling for the first time that day since she was alone in her room that morning.
    In the car, speeding out of the school grounds to the music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Cousin Randy asked whether she had her dried ground peppers with her.
    “Just wanted to make sure that we had a legitimate reason to stop by,” he said. “I told Aracely the last time I saw her that you’d have something for her.”
    Aracely Pimentel’s cooking attracted regular customers from as far away as Fort Dodge and Ottumwa, and recently even two people whodrove all the way from Minneapolis. This was amazing to Eva, to have people drive that far to eat something you made! She couldn’t imagine it. Eva liked to fantasize that Randy and Aracely would get married and she could move in with them and grow ingredients for the restaurant all day. Anything, to be a part of it all. She told that to Randy once and he said, “One step at a time.”
     • • • 
    As they drove from West