Page 22 of Stolen Time
No, it was just a small stucco building that occupied the space right where Hull Avenue curved up the hill, not very prepossessing at all. When Seth opened the door for me, though, the interior wasn’t as changed as I’d thought, and still had the big oak bar to one side with the mirrors above and a row of booths directly opposite.
All of the booths but one were occupied. I reflected it was probably a good thing that we’d come here on a Monday evening and not some other night of the week, or we might have been waiting to sit down for quite a while. A pretty Asian girl gestured for us to take a seat at the booth, then pointed at the menu tacked on the wall near the bar.
Clearly, they didn’t want to waste paper on printing out their bill of fare.
It all seemed pretty basic — a lot of noodle dishes, chop suey. Not a single Szechuan item that I could see, but I told myself to go with the flow and not worry whether the offerings were what I might normally order.
“What’s your favorite dish here?” I asked Seth, who definitely looked more relaxed now that he was seated across from me in a booth and not walking by my side down Main Street.
“It’s all good,” he replied. “But you can’t go wrong with the chop suey. It’s my favorite thing on the menu.”
Since I knew it would be insufferably rude to point out that chop suey wasn’t even traditionally Chinese but rather a dish invented by Chinese immigrants after they came to America and started adapting their recipes to American tastes, I only nodded.
“Then that’s what I’ll have, too.”
He got up and went to the counter to place our orders, and then settled himself in the booth immediately afterward.
“They’ll bring us some tea in a minute.”
Fans worked away overhead, telling me they did exist in Jerome, at least in the commercial spaces. Even so, it was stuffier in the restaurant than I’d been expecting, despite the way all the windows stood open, and I hoped the hot tea and chop suey wouldn’t make me too warm.
But the dress I wore was lightweight, cool cotton, and even though I could have happily ripped off those damn hose and shoved them in the nearest trashcan, I was still a lot morecomfortable than I would have been if I’d slipped back in time to the 1880s or something. My mother’s stories about having to wear a corset and bustle and complicated dresses that weighed upwards of ten pounds each were enough to make me very glad that I’d landed in 1926.
True, she’d gone to Flagstaff in the late autumn, when she didn’t need to worry about the heat, but still.
Sure enough, the same girl — the daughter of the restaurant’s owner? — brought us a little pot of blue willow ware filled with steaming tea, along with a pair of matching cups with no handles. She smiled at us and said our food would be out shortly…her English was very good, telling me she’d either lived in the U.S. for most of her life or had been born here…and then left us alone again.
Seth reached for the teapot and poured some of the fragrant, gently steaming liquid into each of our cups before setting it back down again. A smile played around his mouth, and he said, “So, did Aunt Ruth put you to work today?”
“Some,” I admitted. “I hung laundry on the clothesline and then helped her in the kitchen.” Since I knew that was something of a misrepresentation of what had really happened, I hurried to add, “This is, I measured things and mostly stayed out of the way. What I don’t know about baking would fill a book.”
He picked up his cup of tea and blew on it, then said, “Do you think that’s because you’ve forgotten, or just because you were never much of a baker to begin with?”
There wasn’t anything in his voice except simple curiosity, which led me to believe he didn’t care whether I was the reincarnation of Julia Child or whomever. The realization warmed me a little. I honestly hadn’t even known what I would have expected from a man of his period, except I supposed I thought they all pretty much expected their significant others to be good wives and mothers who could do everything frombaking an apple pie to ensuring the house was tidy no matter how many kids they might have been looking after.
And then I wanted to shake my head at myself. Seth McAllister wasn’t my significant other, and I knew I’d already probably gone too far just by allowing myself to think about how handsome he was…or how kind and thoughtful. No, what my brain really needed to do was come up with a way to get me back to my own time, even if it had failed miserably at the task so far.
“I really don’t know,” I said in answer to his question. “That is, I remembered basic tasks like how to measure ingredients and separate egg whites, but putting them all together definitely wasn’t anything that felt familiar.”
That unfamiliarity extended to the huge cast-iron oven Ruth used to cook and bake, a monstrosity that appeared to be wood-fired and would have intimidated me at the best of times. At least she had running water — and a lovely apron-front sink that wasn’t too dissimilar from the big farmhouse-style version in the house where I’d grown up — but still, I thought even aGreat British Baking Showchampion might have been intimidated by trying to work with that hulking piece of metal.
“Well, I’m sure Ruth was glad of the help, even if you weren’t familiar with everything,” Seth told me, and I could only lift my shoulders.
“I hope so. Mostly, I tried to stay out of the way. But I figured I should do something to try to earn my keep.”
At those words, his slightly arched brows pulled together. “You really shouldn’t look at it that way,” he said. “We’re all happy to help you out. It has to be hard to be stranded in a strange place, away from everyone you know.”
I made a small sound of assent and sipped some tea from my cup. It was fragrant and mild, probably oolong, with little bits of leaf floating around in it. No teabags around the English Kitchen, that was for sure.
The weird thing was, this whole situation felt oddly dissonant, just because I did know Jerome pretty well, even if I wasn’t a native. I knew how the streets were laid out, recognized most of the buildings around me. And the ones I didn’t, I figured they were the structures that had either burned or fallen down or — in the case of the building that had once housed the Cuban Mary brothel, which had slid down Cleopatra Hill a few years before I was born — finally succumbed to gravity. Because of all the mining that had taken place here, the hillsides weren’t terribly stable, and lots of work had been expended over the years to shore up the buildings as best they could. Some simply couldn’t be saved and were left unoccupied until they finally collapsed.
At any rate, it wasn’t as if I’d been dropped in the middle of 1926 Paris or something. My surroundings were familiar enough; it was the people and the cars and the music and everything else that had utterly changed.
I couldn’t tell Seth any of this, obviously.
No, I could only smile and say, “Well, it would have been a lot harder if I hadn’t landed in McAllister territory.”
At those words, his brows drew together again, and I wanted to curse myself for my clumsiness. Most people probably would have thought the phrase utterly innocuous, but witch clans always referred to their lands as their “territory,” and by doing so, I’d made an obvious stumble despite my efforts to watch what I said.