Coming Up Roses (22 page)

She nodded. The wind seemed to have gone out
of her sails. H.L. hoped so, because he didn’t relish another
half-hour or so of being raked over the coals.

“
What’s a wop?”

The question startled H.L., who’d expected
her to begin going over business as soon as she recovered from
being startled. “Beg pardon?”

“
What’s a wop?” she repeated. “And
what’s a mick.”

“
Ah. A wop is an Italian. A mick is an
Irishman.”

“
You’re Irish?”

He held his hand over the table and rocked it
in an equivocating gesture. “Sort of. I guess my ancestors were
from the Emerald Isle. I’m from Missouri, myself.”

“
Missouri? Really?” Her blue eyes
opened so wide, H.L. had the feeling he might just drown in them if
he wasn’t careful.

“
Right. Why does that surprise
you?”

“
I—don’t know. I guess I just thought
of you as being from Chicago, if you know what I mean.”

“
I think so. I belong here. Ergo, you
thought I was of here. Right?”

She looked at him for several seconds as if
she had no idea on God’s green earth what he was talking about.
H.L. was slightly puzzled at her reaction.

Eventually, she muttered, “I guess so.”

“
Antipasto, my friends!”

H.L.’s concentration had been on Rose to the
exclusion of everything else, so Waldo’s enthusiastic announcement
surprised him. It also pleased him. He loved the tasty, meaty,
olive-y salad. “Thank you, Waldo. I didn’t even think of ordering
antipasto.”

Waldo bowed as he set the platter before them
and began serving the antipasto into individual dishes. “Your
companions look as though they need a hearty meal, H.L. Besides—”
Here he shot a wink and another bow at Rose, who stiffened. “—it’s
not often we get so famous a guest at Joe’s.”

H.L. beamed at him. “Ah, so you recognize
Miss Gilhooley?”

“
Yes, indeed.” Waldo even managed to
look smitten, and H.L. gave him points for dramatic skill. “I saw
you Saturday night, Miss Gilhooley, and I must say I was never more
impressed. You looked like an angel riding that white horse around
the arena.”

H.L. noticed that Rose was not so used to
people praising her that she couldn’t blush. She blushed now, her
cheeks turning as rosy as the tomatoes in the salad Waldo set
before her with a flourish. He guessed she’d forgiven him the
wink.

“
Thank you. You’re very
kind.”

“
Kind? You’re an angel. A princess on
horseback. A vision. A—”

“
Right. And more,” H.L. interrupted,
laughing. “You may not realize it, Waldo, but you have another
famous person dining at Joe’s this afternoon.” He indicated his
other companion. “Allow me to introduce you to Little Elk, the
great Sioux warrior.”

Both Little Elk and Rose stared at him, but
H.L. didn’t care. If they didn’t know good publicity when it
presented itself, he did. The expression on Waldo’s face proved it,
in fact.

“
By golly,” Waldo said in a hushed
voice. “By golly. May I shake your hand, Mr. Elk?”

Little Elk, probably used to the strange and
unusual ways of the white man by this time, looked vaguely resigned
as he held out a rough brown hand for Waldo to shake.

“
It’s an honor, Mr. Elk,” Waldo said,
sounding reverent. “It’s a true honor. Even though most people
don’t realize it, I read recently that it’s been proven that the
Indian is one of the lost tribes of Israel. It’s a real honor to
meet you.”

H.L. feared for a moment that Waldo might
actually fall on his knees and do some sort of obeisance before
Little Elk, but he didn’t. After another moment or two of sharing
outrageous complements between Rose and Little Elk, Waldo took
himself off.

“
Don’t mind Waldo,” H.L. advised. “He’s
Italian.”

“
He seems very nice,” Rose said
uncertainly. “What does his being Italian have to do with anything?
There were Italian soldiers at the fort near Deadwood. They seemed
just like everyone else to me.”

“
Ah, but we each bring our culture with
us into this life, Miss Gilhooley. And Waldo’s Italian.”

“
Oh.”

When he glanced at her, she was frowning and
fiddling with her fork.

He wondered what he’d said to bring on that
frown, but didn’t pursue it. He wanted to introduce his new friends
to Joe’s fabulous food.

“
Dig in,” he prompted. “This is an
Italian salad, and I think it’s great.”

He didn’t have to ask twice. Apparently Rose
was as hungry as he and Little Elk were. She cut a delicate bite of
lettuce and tomato, stabbed a bite of salami, and put the
combination into her mouth. H.L. watched avidly as she chewed. Her
eyes narrowed, then went wide, and she appeared somewhat
puzzled.

“
Well?” he asked when he couldn’t stand
the suspense any longer. “What do you think?”

She put her fork on her plate and looked at
him. “I’ve never tasted anything like it. It’s . . . different.
Tasty. Um, we don’t generally mix meat into our salads back home in
Deadwood.”

He chuckled as he tackled his own salad.
“Don’t reckon you do. Most folks don’t, although I suppose you
could look at it sort of like a cold stew.” Turning to Little Elk,
he asked, “What do you think?”

Little Elk seemed to be pushing his tomatoes
and lettuce aside so that he could get at the salami and cheese on
the plate. “Good,” he said.

A man of few words, H.L. thought with
amusement. Not like H.L. May, who made his living with the little
suckers. After taking another big bite of his own antipasto, he
said, “I like the dressing. It’s tangy.”

“
Tangy,” Rose repeated after swallowing
another bite from her own plate. “Yes. That’s a good word for
it.”

He didn’t know why she appeared so unsure of
herself. Hell, all she had to do at the moment was eat, and he knew
she was hungry, because he’d heard her stomach growl. “You don’t
have to eat the whole thing if you don’t want it,” he said, feeling
as though he’d sold out a friend to the enemy—how anybody could not
like Joe’s food was incomprehensible to him. “Waldo will be
bringing our spaghetti pretty soon.”

Rose swallowed another small bite of lettuce
and tomato and cleared her throat. “Um, when we were in Rome, I
think we ate spaghetti, but I’m not sure. The food was different
there. But good,” she added in a rush, as though she didn’t want
him to think she was complaining. “I, ah, have enjoyed eating
different foods in different places.”

“
Yeah? That’s good, because Chicago’s
got ‘em all. We have Spaniards and Poles and Italians and Greeks
and Irish and Bohemians and Bulgarians and Germans and just about
every country in the world represented somewhere in
Chicago.”

“
My goodness.”

As H.L. had predicted, Waldo arrived bearing
plates heaped with spaghetti and meatballs in a tomato sauce that
smelled enticingly of garlic and other exotic spices. They were
exotic to Rose, at any rate, who had as a child become used to
eating beans and meat boiled together—when her mother could get
meat. They’d often eaten eggs from the chickens out back, cooked
with onions, and served with a side dish of some sort of
greens.

After Rose had started shooting game, the
family’s diet improved considerably. Still, except for her mother’s
garden, in which she grew onions, cabbages, kale, beets, carrots,
and a few other crops that could withstand the harsh Kansas
weather, Rose’s diet had been rather circumscribed until she’d
joined the Wild West.

Even these days, she approached new foods
with a certain degree of caution. It’s not that she didn’t enjoy
new experiences, but that she worried about her country stomach.
She wasn’t precisely sure how much it could take of new and unusual
foods.

After watching how H.L. tackled the long
strings of spaghetti by twirling them with his fork balanced on his
spoon, Rose attempted to do the same. All but one spaghetti strand
slipped from her fork’s tines, but she figured that was all to the
good. It would be easier to swallow a little bit of something she
hated than a huge forkful. As soon as the savory mixture touched
her tongue, she decided she needed more spaghetti practice.

“
Oh, my! This is wonderful!”

“
Good,” Little Elk added. He didn’t
bother with H.L.’s fancy maneuvering with fork and spoon, but
rather cut his spaghetti into manageable bites and spooned them
into his mouth, foregoing his fork altogether. Rose deemed such an
expedient solution to a messy problem quite clever on his
part.

“
Glad you like it.”

H.L. could probably have been forgiven his
smug expression, had Rose been in the forgiving mood. She was still
irked with him, however, and didn’t appreciate it. Nevertheless,
she felt as though she were starving to death, and the food was
delicious, and she ate as quickly as she could, given the overall
slipperiness of the fodder provided.

“
After we eat, we need to plot
strategy,” H.L. said between mouthfuls.

“
Indeed,” said Rose, likewise
engaged.

Little Elk grunted. One thing you could say
for the Sioux, thought Rose indulgently, was that they didn’t get
sidetracked. If the problem was finding lost boys, they
concentrated exclusively on that. If the matter at hand was supper,
they concentrated on that. She had to admit that life was probably
much simpler and more easily handled if one tackled one problem at
a time. At the moment, she decided she’d be happy to concentrate on
supper, except that Bear in Winter’s young face kept obtruding
itself into her mind’s eye.

They finished their meal after not too long,
however, so Rose could turn her entire attention on the Bear
problem. She smiled at Waldo as he picked up her plate, but the
smile faded when she saw his black frown. She cast a quick glance
at H.L., but his face didn’t offer her any clues as to why the
waiter should be displeased.

“
You didn’t like your supper?” Waldo
asked Rose peremptorily.

“
What?” She goggled for only a moment.
“Oh, no! I mean, yes! I loved it. It was delicious. I’ve never
eaten anything so tasty.”

Waldo eyed her narrowly, then looked down at
her plate. Rose guessed she had left a lot of her spaghetti
uneaten, but she’d stuffed herself until she feared she’d pop if
she’d taken one more tiny bite.

“
You didn’t eat much.” Waldo sounded
accusatory.

“
Give the girl a break, Waldo,” H.L.
said, laughing. “She’s as big as a minute. Such a small package
can’t hold a whole lot.”

Rose bridled. If she wasn’t trying to soothe
the waiter’s temper, she’d have said something scathing to H.L.
May, who was probably the rudest, most impossible, rash, and
impertinent man she’d ever met in her life. Instead, she forced a
smile and said, “That’s it, all right. I ate as much as I could. I
wish I could hold more, but I just can’t.”

Waldo said, “Hmmm,” as if he didn’t believe
either of them, but he didn’t look quite as upset as he had a
moment earlier. Without questioning Rose further, he took the
plates away.

As soon as he was out of earshot, Rose turned
to H.L. “How dare you speak of me as if I were a—a—a—”
Fiddlesticks. She didn’t know a word for it.

“
Commodity?” H.L. supplied, grinning at
her.

“
Yes.” Actually, she didn’t know. What
was a commodity? Blast! She was going to buy herself a dictionary
and read the blamed thing from A to Z as soon as they found
Bear.

“
I only did it to soothe Waldo’s
sensibilities, Miss Gilhooley. He takes it hard when people don’t
finish their meals.”

“
Good heavens, that plate held enough
food to serve six people, for heaven’s sake,” she grumbled, feeling
out of sorts—but no longer hungry.

“
I eat what you don’t next time,”
Little Elk offered.

Rose glanced at him, feeling guilty. She
ought to have remembered how much Little Elk and the rest of her
Sioux friends loved food. She figured it was because their
generations-old way of life had been so severely compromised by
white settlers in recent years that they ate whatever they could
find whenever they could find it, and as much of it as possible.
“I’m sorry, Little Elk. I’ll remember next time.”

He nodded and smiled, and she knew he didn’t
fault her for forgetting her manners this time.

“
All right, folks, let’s plan some kind
of strategy in finding the lost boy.”

“
He’s not lost,” Rose reminded H.L.
with feeling. “He was kidnapped.”

“
Right.”

She resented it when he rolled his eyes, as
if he found her insistence on exact wording unnecessary and
annoying.

“
All right. We can’t dash off in all
directions, because we won’t get anywhere, so I have a
suggestion.”

Rose frowned at him. “I don’t believe you
have any tracking skills at all, Mr. May. How could you? You live
in the city. I believe Little Elk and I would be better equipped to
find the boy.” He looked peeved.

Rose didn’t care. Bear in Winter was worth
fighting for, darn it.

“
Listen, Miss Gilhooley. I know you
consider yourself akin to some kind of great white hunter, but
before you barge off and get yourself into trouble, don’t you think
we ought to figure out where the lad might be?”

She sniffed, but had to admit he was right.
“How do you propose to do that?”