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“Why can’t you live with us?”
“How about you come down to Texas and stay with me?”
“Without Momma?”
“We’ll work all that out.”
Hackberry could see the confusion growing in the boy’s face. He looked at Ruby.
“There’s the waiter with your waffle, Ishmael,” she said. “Let’s eat and talk later.”
“You said Big Bud might be staying.”
Her cheeks flushed again.
“I plan to stay as long as I can,” Hackberry said, patting the boy’s back. “Maybe we’ll take a train ride up to Denver and visit Elitch Gardens and see a moving picture show. Have you ever seen a moving picture?”
“No, sir.”
“I haven’t, either. We can do it together,” Hackberry said. “That’s the way you do things, see? Together. That makes everything more fun, doesn’t it?”
“You’re not going off, are you?” Ishmael said.
“No, not at all,” he said. “My schedule is just a little uncertain right now. I declare, this is a nice town.”
His head was pounding. He couldn’t eat his steak and eggs. He stood up from the table and removed his hat from the back of the chair. He put a ten-dollar gold piece by his plate. “I slept in a bad position last night. I’ll walk up and down a bit and meet y’all in the lobby,” he said.
“We need to get back home,” Ruby said. “I have to be at work by ten.”
“Tell them you’re sick and you’re not coming in. The unions are supposed to be sympathetic with women’s problems, aren’t they? You want me to talk to them?”
She gave him a look that was just short of a slap. He went out into the cold and walked around the block, then sat down in the lobby next to a potted palm. His hands were shaking, but not from the cold. When she entered the lobby with Ishmael in tow, he stood up, his Stetson hanging from his fingers against his trouser leg, his heart beating. “I say everything wrong,” he said. “I brought you a rose.”
“I need to go home before I go to work. Can you get us a carriage?”
“Sure. I’ll take care of Ishmael.”
“You don’t need to.”
“Where do you live?”
“That’s not important. Walk outside with me.”
They went out on the sidewalk. She put Ishmael inside a carriage and turned back to Hackberry, her face a few inches from his. She had buttoned the stem of the rose inside her shirt. The wind was feathering her hair around the edges of her hat. The curvature of her chest was like a dove’s. He had never seen a woman whose mouth was so inviting. “Do you love her?” she asked.
“She took care of me when I couldn’t get a saucer of coffee to my lips.”
“My question was an honest one. Will you answer it?”
“There’s different kinds of love.”
“Which kind did you have for me and Ishmael?”
“A kind that’s more than I can explain,” he said. “A kind that’s not in the past tense, either.”
Her eyes seemed to go inside his head. “I’ll be finished at the union hall at five o’clock if you want to see us.”
“Of course I want to see you. Why won’t you tell me where you live?”
