The Middlesteins(56)
But that was a regret, too. He wanted her son to like him. He knew that Edie would still care for him even if her son didn’t, but if Kenneth’s own family was so important to him, how could it not be the same for this dear woman?
A final regret: that he hadn’t walked up to Richard Middlestein and looked him straight in the eye and let him know what was what. A finger jab to the neck, he remembered that move from a long time ago. But it was not his battle to fight, it was Edie’s, and he wouldn’t think of getting in her way.
The minute he released her hand, he resolved to make it up to her.
Six hours later, after twenty tables had come and gone, Kenneth stood in the kitchen pulling noodles quietly, holding the dough high in the air and then twisting it, folding the dough in half, then stretching it again. The action was mindless, yet infused with love. He rolled the dough in flour. Long, thick noodles emerged, and as he twisted and halved and stretched, they quickly became shorter and thinner. Nearby sat cumin seeds, lamb, garlic, and chilies. These foods would warm her up. He had never met anyone with so much fire in her mind and heart as Edie, but with such a cold stomach.
She had allowed him to examine her tongue the night before, and it was pale and swollen. Her pulse was slow. He had put his hand underneath her shirt, and on her belly.
“Too cold,” he had said.
“Come here, then,” she had replied, her arms outstretched, her tongue lighting up the edges of her lips. “Warm me up.”
His daughter, Anna, pushed her way through the double doors with the last of the dirty dishes. She blew back her purple-streaked bangs from her face and, as she bustled past, glanced at her father and at the food spread before him on the counter.
“Dinner for two?” she said.
He blushed. He was still thinking of all the ways he could heat Edie up. He had not felt this filled with desire since he was a young man and had first met Marie, his wife, now gone, hovering up in the sky somewhere. It had been eight years since she’d died, eight years since he’d had sex, and that time alone had felt cursed. Now here was Edie, reversing the curse.
“I could make some for you, too,” he offered to Anna. He worried briefly that he had not been paying enough attention to his daughter while he’d been so busy becoming invested in this relationship with Edie. He saw her every day at the restaurant, though. They spoke all day long, even when they did not exchange a word.
Surely she was sick of this old man anyway. She had watched over him after their beloved Marie had passed away and he’d moved back to Chicago six years earlier, after failing at restaurant after restaurant across the Midwest. Once Marie and he had been ringers: Plant the two of them in a strip mall in any town and they could transform an empty restaurant into a successful enterprise, usually called the Golden Dragon, sometimes the Lotus Inn, and every once in a while New China Cuisine, which Kenneth disliked because he thought it had less character but Marie appreciated because of its efficiency.
They didn’t pick the names; Marie’s father did. He funded their start-up costs with his partners, and when they had built a solid base, he replaced them with less experienced chefs and sent them to the next location. They had left a trail of cities behind them: Cincinnati, Kansas City, Bloomington, Milwaukee, on and on, until Anna hit adolescence and begged them to pick a city and stay there. And so they picked Madison, where Kenneth was charmed by the pleasant academics who became their regulars and Marie admired the community’s strong sense of responsibility to the environment. Kenneth did not like the cold winters or the drunken buffoons at the fraternities who harassed his deliverymen, but he had to admit that it was a pretty city, green and serene during the summers, and a nice place to raise a child. They lived there for five years, and then Anna went to art school in Chicago, and then Kenneth got the itch to move; he had enjoyed their life on the road. But Marie wanted to stay.
Kenneth said, “Is this it? Will we just live and die in Madison?”
Marie, fine-boned, clearheaded, not a fighter, said quietly, “There are worse places to spend the rest of your life.”
“What about Cincinnati again?” he said. “Six months in Cincy. You liked it there.”
She had not minded Cincinnati, it was true. There was a good bookstore there, and it was clean and safe, and they had enjoyed getting ice cream from Graeter’s on Sunday nights, the three of them, Kenneth, Marie, and little Anna, the ice-cream cone almost as big as her head, it seemed. That had been fifteen years before, though.
“Why go back to where we have already been?” she said.
They moved to Louisville, where they had convinced Marie’s father to open a restaurant in the Highlands neighborhood, on Baxter, where all the foot traffic was. They liked having a lively clientele. They bumped up their prices. They named it Song Cuisine, and they knocked down a wall and cleaned out a back room, and on the weekends local musicians came and played their guitars and sang. They were forty-five years old, and it was like they were twenty-two again, only they had never been twenty-two in the first place because they had always been working, and then they were parents and were already old. They had never had so much fun before. Anna came and stayed with them during winter break and said she didn’t recognize them. “Who are you, and what have you done with my parents?” she said. Anna stayed out late one night drinking with a singer from Nashville passing through on his way to a show in New York City, and Kenneth found himself trusting his daughter like he had not before. He merely laughed when he heard her stumbling in late, cursing, and then shushing herself. The next morning he teased her about it. They were all growing into something new together. Madison was not it, but maybe Louisville was.