God Himself couldn’t have made me take a step back rather than forward to look at those perfectly round pancakes. Not even the dark-brown eyes that were still glaring at me could put me out of a room with food in it. Especially when I owned the place.
Rosalie shook her long-handled spatula at me. “I said get out!”
“I’m broke, hungry, tired, and angry, and I want food,” I said.
“I don’t take in strays—not any kind, two legged or four,” she declared.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I should have introduced myself. I’m Carla Wilson, the new owner of this place, and I am starving.”
“So, Larry finally found a buyer for the place, did he?” She tucked a strand of black hair up under the bonnet-looking thing on her head.
“No, he didn’t,” I answered. “I won it in a poker game.”
She made the sign of the cross over her chest, sighed loudly, and looked up at the ceiling. Her lips moved, but no words came out. When she focused back on me, her brown eyes were mere slits. “How do I know you are telling the truth?”
I set my purse on the table in the middle of the kitchen and brought out the quitclaim deed Larry had given me and handed it to her. “If this is good, I’m the new owner. If it isn’t, then I’m about to ask for a job. Like I said before, I’m dead broke and I am hungry. And I’m out of fuel in my SUV, so I can’t go any farther.”
She picked it up and studied it for what seemed like hours before she handed it back to me and yelled through the service window, “Hey, Scarlett, come on back here and meet the new owner.”
Scarlett was as pale as vanilla pudding when she came through the swinging doors. “Are we out of a job?”
“No, ma’am, you are not,” I told her. “Is it all right for me to eat while we talk?”
“I’m the only one who is allowed near my stove or my cooking pots, so you tell me what you want for breakfast and I’ll make it,” Rosalie said.
“I don’t like onions, but anything else is fine,” I told her. “Are you two the only ones who work here?”
“That’s right,” Rosalie answered as she cracked eggs in a bowl and whipped them into a froth. “Larry breezed through on Monday to pick up the money and go to the bank, but other than that, we’re on our own. We manage.”
Scarlett peeked out over the swinging doors at the customers. “So, you are not selling the café or closing it until a buyer comes along?”
“Not right now,” I answered. “How long has it been up for sale?”
“Since the day Larry took ownership,” Rosalie said without even turning around.
“Just how big is Tumbleweed, anyway? I guess this place is on the outskirts, right?”
Scarlett laughed out loud. “You are looking at it. Since you got here, the population has risen to three. It never was a real town, just a wide place in the road.”
Rosalie chuckled. “It’s never had a post office or a school.”
“Or a liquor store, which makes Rosie a happy woman,” Scarlett added.
“You have got to be kiddin’ me.” I was sure they were just yanking me around and that there was a real town named Tumbleweed not too far up the road.
“Nope.” Rosalie set a platter of eggs, bacon, hash browns, and biscuits in front of me, then slid another plate of pancakes covered in melted butter and a mug of coffee beside it. “Everything else you might need is right there.” She pointed to a condiment tray in the middle of the small wooden table in the kitchen. “If you want a town, you have to drive about fifteen miles north to Dell City.”
“I’m not sure you can call it a town,” Scarlett said, “but it does have a post office, a school, and a convenience store for the folks to buy gas, milk, bread, and that kind of thing. I’ve got to go refill drinks. We can talk later when the bus crowd clears out, but welcome to Tumbleweed.” She pushed through the doors and back out to the dining area.
“Dell City is a tiny town with only about three hundred people living there, but there is a church up there where I can go to Mass. So I’m not complaining one bit.” Rosalie made the sign of the cross again and sat down across from me.
Her gaze made me shift positions in my chair, twice, as I ate my eggs. From her expression, it didn’t take a genius to know that no one messed with her religion—or her kitchen.
I stood up, refilled my coffee mug, and then went back to finish my breakfast. “Well, this place sure got the right name. I had to fight tumbleweeds blowing around all the way from El Paso.”
“It’s that time of year,” Rosalie said.
I dove into the pancakes like a hungry hound dog with a big soupbone. That vision almost put a smile on my face, but it soonfaded when I remembered that Frank often said that very thing when we stopped at a place to eat. I didn’t want anything to remind me of him or his wife or the two little boys they’d produced. He called them my brothers when he talked to me on my birthday each year, but I felt more of a kinship to the two women in this café than I did for those two kids, whom I had met only one time. And that was at the Thanksgiving family reunion in Kentucky—a disaster I did not plan on going through again.
