Kitchens of the Great Midwest (34 page)

“Split down the middle?” Yonas asked, holding up the credit cards.

“Yes,” Cindy said. “So where is it happening tonight?”

“You will see.”

“You’re driving us? You work for her?”

“Yes.”

“Can you take us to our hotels first?” Reynaldo asked.

“Whatever you like,” Yonas said, handing them back their cards. “I will collect you each around five to arrive at the property by six.”

 • • • 

Stepping out of the baggage claim in Pierre into the afternoon August air was like stepping into God’s own dryer; Cynthia had only been to South Dakota once before, and didn’t recall it being so hot, or so flat.

“Whoa, someone left the heat on,” Yonas Awate said as he led them across the parking lot. When nobody responded to the comment, he shouted, “Humor!”

“I’ve been up since four in the morning,” Reynaldo said.

 • • • 

Yonas motioned them toward a black Lincoln Town Car. There was tan dust on the wheels and the bottoms of the doors. A tall blond guy with sunglasses and a perfume model’s jawline sat in the front passenger seat with the window open. Yonas motioned toward the man, introduced him as a dinner guest named Holger Schmidt, and made introductions all around.

 • • • 

“Where you from, Yonas?” Reynaldo asked once they were on the road.

“Minneapolis,” Yonas said.

“No, I mean originally.”

Yonas bit his lip. Cindy could tell by his expression that Yonas hated having this conversation. Reynaldo’s dorky public chatter never endeared him to people as much as he thought it did.

“My parents were born in Eritrea,” he said. He pointed to the climate controls on the dashboard. “Hot, cold, indifferent?”

“I’m a little warm,” Cindy said, and Yonas turned on the air conditioner and passed her back a cool glass bottle of water with a white label that read
BUHL
R
-
O
.

“What’s Buhl R-O?” she asked.

“It’s the purest water in the world. It’s from a pristine deep well near Buhl in northern Minnesota. Then they run it through a proprietary reverse osmosis and ion-exchange purification system.”

“Wow, never heard of it.”

“It’s the only kind of water Eva Thorvald uses.”

“So, what’s she like in person?”

“She’s like this water. That’s all I will tell you.”

Cindy opened the bottle and held it to her lips. It tasted like thick, cool fog.

“You know, where they bottle this water, it’s actually treated as hazardous waste under Minnesota law,” Yonas said. “It turns out, water with all of the impurities taken out is violently solvent. But bottling it, you let some bacteria settle in, and it mellows out.”

Yonas held out a bottle for Holger.

“No, sounds hideous,” Holger said, with a slight German accent.

“Different strokes,” said Yonas.

Reynaldo nudged Cindy. “Want to see a picture of my daughter?”

“Nope,” Cindy said.

“I’ll see it,” Holger said.

“OK, sure,” Reynaldo said, and passed his phone up to Holger. Holger looked at the picture for two seconds and passed it back to Reynaldo.

“I don’t recognize her,” Holger said. “I go to all the clubs in Berlin and I’ve never seen her before.”

Reynaldo looked a little scared. “Well, I kind of hope not.”

“Just messing with you,” Holger said.

“How about some music?” said Yonas.

 • • • 

Cindy’s hotel room had a fake lemon smell and a squealy AC window unit. There was a stain on the carpet the shape of Wisconsin and scratches on weird parts of the walls, out of the reach of adults or furniture. An old tube television was chained to a console by a metal wire and the remote was glued to the bedside table in some kind of plastic holder.

When she was with Reynaldo, they never would’ve stayed in a place like this, and with his money, they didn’t have to. Now it was the only kind of place she even considered, and she didn’t care. She’d had decades of luxury travel, on her own and with her second and third husbands, and it didn’t matter how expensive or opulent the room was, checkout was still always at eleven, and when she walked out the hotel doors, she was still herself, and the thread count and concierge service and private pools were no longer real; they were borrowed like bodies in a dream.

What really broke Cindy’s heart was when she’d see the bill and think of what wine they could’ve bought with that money. She believed that no hotel in the world, now known or yet to be conceived, could ever dominate your senses like a 1989 Château Margaux or pack more surprises into twenty seconds than a 2007 Les Clos Sacrés Savennières. Every aspect of a hotel room was ephemeral; a great wine stayed with you forever.

Therefore, she was absolutely OK with a hotel room that had a view of a parking lot, a highway, and a Happy Chef restaurant, all of it chastely, happily American, lacking in any glamour or pretense, apologizing for nothing.

As she watched semi trucks grumble to and from the restaurant, she begrudged all this lack of significance for one reason only: that this was
going to be the place where she reunited with her daughter, somewhere out there in all this Dakota.

She lay down on top of the spongy, flower-patterned comforter, but in spite of having slept only three hours, she wasn’t tired. She had the pepper in her blood of a soldier being sent to war. There was nothing like home here. Just, perhaps, something to hold on to in the absence of one.

 • • • 

Cindy was applying lipstick at ten minutes to five when she heard a knock at the door.

“Ms. Reyna!” a man’s voice called out.

Cindy opened the door to find a scruffy guy in a plain black suit standing in the dingy hallway. He had the vibe of a heavy metal drummer; he had a lot of rings on his fingers and she bet there were tattoos under his jacket sleeves. He extended a ring-laden hand with a smile.

“I’m Randy Dragelski,” the guy said. “Your car is waiting.”

“Is Yonas here?”

“Yonas is now just with Mr. Schmidt. I’ll be driving you and Mr. Reyna.”

“Just a minute,” Cindy said, leaving the door open. Randy remained outside in the hall. “You can come in, I just need to finish up.”

Randy watched as Cindy finished with her lips. “Wow, damn,” he said.

“What?” Cindy asked.

“Oh, nothin’,” Randy said. “You just have real similar eyes to Eva’s.”

“Oh, what a funny coincidence,” Cindy said.

 • • • 

Cindy was relieved to see that she was the first person to be picked up. She took the front passenger seat next to Randy, who drove with one arm fully extended to the top of the steering wheel.

“How long have you worked for Eva?” Cindy asked as she buckled her seat belt.

“I’ve worked with her the longest. I was the first hire when it was still just her and Elodie running things.”

“How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know, fall 2009, or something.”

“What do you do for her?’

“I used to do a little bit of everything, but now I just do this. Guest relations. It’s my favorite part.”

“So, what’s she like, Eva Thorvald?”

“She’s amazing.” The love was evident in his voice, but after a breath, he frowned. “Is this for a blog or something?

“No, I work in a restaurant in Michigan. I’m just curious. Is she a good person to work with?”

“Yeah, or I wouldn’t be here.” He was all business now. “She’s the best and expects the best.”

Cindy put on a pair of old eyeglasses, which she kept in her purse as a backup and hardly wore. “I wonder what her upbringing was like.”

“She wouldn’t want me to discuss it with guests,” Randy said.

Cindy was surprised. “Oh. Can you tell me where she’s from?”

“Same place as me,” Randy said. “A place that’s gone.”

 • • • 

Reynaldo was waiting under the porte cochere of his hotel, wearing a tuxedo, which made Cindy shake her head.

He stared at Cindy when he got in the backseat. “What’s with the glasses?” he asked.

 • • • 

As they drove out of Pierre and into the country, Cindy looked out the window. The car dipped between green hills, where clumps of trees gathered in the acres of tall grass, like lost platoons from a defeated army. They saw a sign for the Crow Creek Reservation and, later, signs for something called Wall Drug.

After a while, Reynaldo tapped the back of Cindy’s seat. “So what’s new in your life?” he asked.

“Not much,” she said, not turning around. “Same same.”

“Boyfriend?”

“Just got a dog,” she said. “A Welsh corgi puppy.”

“Ha, I thought you said you didn’t want kids.”

“What do you mean?”

“With a dog, it’s almost like having a kid.”

“No, it’s not like having a kid,” she said. “It’s preferable in every possible way. That makes it like having a dog.”

 • • • 

They turned down a paved two-lane road, and from the top of a gravy-colored hill, Cindy could see a valley lined with trees. They turned down a dirt road that jostled the car and made the fancy water in the drink holders quiver in sympathy.

A wooden and barbed-wire fence, which went off endlessly in both directions, enclosed nothing that Cindy could discern. Two men wearing suits and walkie-talkies with headsets stood by its gate, and Randy stopped the car when he approached them.

“Reynaldo Reyna and his plus one, Cindy Reyna,” Randy told them, and Cindy watched as the young men relayed those names back to a supervisor. Eva Thorvald would now know that they were here.

 • • • 

From the car, they could see the top of a hill, with two long dining room tables covered in ivory tablecloths.

“Those are Regency tables,” Reynaldo said. “Real nice. You can tell by the legs.”

Cindy had no idea when or where her pediatric surgeon ex-husband had learned about dining tables. As they drove past, they could see a small, diverse staff bringing ornate chairs out to the tables.

The car stopped by an immense tent, maybe a hundred feet long or more, which looked to Cindy like an Arabian tent for oil sheiks. Next to the tent, there was a two-story bus that said
WILSHIRE
MOBILE
ESTATES
. She supposed that was Eva’s private coach.

 • • • 

Randy opened Cindy’s door. He collected Cindy’s and Reynaldo’s cell phones after an armed man in sunglasses patted them down. He asked them to step into the tent for tea or cocktails, and said that men’s and women’s washrooms were in the luxury bus.

“Is Eva joining us for drinks?” Cindy asked.

“No,” Randy said. “She’s very busy.”

“Where’s the kitchen?”

“Can’t go there, ma’am.”

“Can you just show me where it is?”

Randy got on his walkie. “Hey Braque, got a guest here who wants to see the kitchen.”

“You got the guest’s phone and camera?” Braque responded.

“Yep.”

“Let me ask. Who’s the guest?”

“Cindy Reyna.”

“OK, one sec.”

Cindy watched Reynaldo proceed into the guest tent where the drinks were being served. She wasn’t able to see inside in the brief time he’d pulled the flap aside. “Is this a strange request?”

“Not really,” Randy said. “People ask to see the kitchen all the time.”

The walkie crackled. “That’s a negative.”

“OK,” Randy said, then looked at Cindy. “Sorry.”

Cindy turned her back to the tent. “What are you up to now?”

“I have to greet the late arrivals,” Randy said, looking at the sky, where a bright yellow-and-green hot-air balloon hovered against the blue.
“Depending on what we learn about our guests, they may not merely get picked up by a car at the airport.”

“May I join you?” Cindy asked. “I’m done hanging out with my ex-husband in enclosed spaces.”

“You might get dirty,” Randy said.

 • • • 

Cindy followed Randy down a wooded hill to the edge of a wide, brownish-blue river. Fallen branches, shrubs, and saplings grabbed at them; there didn’t appear to be a trail, but Randy seemed to know where he was going. The last time Cindy had been in the woods was the previous summer when some of the girls from work rented a cabin upstate, and she hardly even went outside the whole time.

If they could see her now. A sharp twig scratched her calf; she removed her heels and mud rose between her toes. It was exhilarating.

She stopped near the river’s edge when it started to get muddy, but Randy charged on ahead, tan streaks smearing across his black pant legs.

“There they are,” he said, pointing at the river. A red canoe with two people in it was making its way across the water toward them. Randy trudged back into the woods, toward a tree with a black ribbon tied around it. How he knew where all these things were, Cindy couldn’t fathom.

The boaters had landed; they were a young, fit-looking couple in jeans, plaid shirts, and life jackets, but were dirty and wet and looked like they hadn’t slept in days.

“Now what?” the woman said, collapsing on the shore.

“OK, the next thing on the list is this,” the man said, sitting down in the muddy grass, pulling a laminated card from his cargo pants. “It just says, ‘Quiet Dog Tree.’”

The woman sat up and stared into the forest. The man continued to look at the card, repeating the phrase to himself.

“There it is,” the woman said, pointing up the beach to her left. “Up there, the tree with the bark shaved off.”

“No bark. Oh, that was an easy one,” the guy said, and he followed the woman up into the woods near where Randy and Cindy were hiding.

The couple knelt by the naked tree and saw a laminated card that read
LOOK
UP
.

“Welcome to The Dinner,” Randy said, walking toward them. “Follow me for tea and cocktails.”

The man and woman shrieked and hugged each other.

 • • • 

They said they’d been offered an “adventure package” when their reservation was accepted, which meant that they had to find their way here from their home in Chicago using only clues and nonmotorized transport. They said it took them just under a week.

“What are your names?” Cindy asked them.

“Will and Katie Prager,” the young man said, pride evident in his phrasing, which was sweet.