The Sourdough Wars

stolen.”

Chapter Fourteen
    We met at the Little City in North Beach, where you can get whole roasted bulbs of garlic, which you spread like anchovy paste on your sourdough, and where the pesto is not confined to the pasta. You can get it all over your salad and your antipasto and probably your hands and face if you want it there.
    It was the right place for nerve-steadying herbs, but I still wasn’t sure I wanted to break bread—even garlic-spread bread—with Rob. I was the first one there, and I sat at the bar instead of a table, so as not to commit myself. He came in and kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t turn the other. “So,” I said, “the second starter’s been stolen.”
    Rob nodded. “By a sinister scoundrel who snuck away scot-free.”
    “Don’t be cute. I’m not in the mood.”
    “Or perhaps a sly slut speeding scurrilously sinward.”
    I slipped off my bar stool. “I’m going home.”
    He took hold of an elbow. “You can’t. You’re my valentine.”
    “Your ex-valentine.”
    “Okay then. You have to give back the present I gave you last year.”
    He had given me a little heart-shaped ceramic box that now sat on my glass-topped coffee table in lieu of the thing that used to sit there—a heavy sculpture I’d given to Rob. It had been used as a murder weapon, and I couldn’t stand to have it around anymore.
    Somehow, thinking about the little heart-shaped box reminded me again of how I’d met Rob and how nice he’d been to me when I was involved in a murder case—I mean, another murder case—and how much in love with him I used to be. I guessed I still was. I sat back down.
    “A carafe of the house white,” Rob said to the bartender. I said, “So how did he or she do it?”
    “Who?”
    “The scoundrel or the slut.”
    “Oh. Nobody knows. It’s like the last time—nobody’d even know the starter was missing if it hadn’t been for the foiled attempt at the other warehouse, which prompted a check.”
    “Do you think our burglar did it—the one we stopped?”
    Rob shrugged. “Who knows? Shall we move to a table?”
    “No. Let’s talk about last night.”
    “I said I’m sorry.” He turned his blue eyes on me and rubbed a knuckle across my cheek. “Pussycat. You could have been hurt.”
    I looked around to see if anyone had heard the pet name. At least, he hadn’t said Rosa Sharon, which he sometimes called me—I wasn’t sure if he thought I was the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley, or if I reminded him of the Okie girl in the
Grapes of Wrath
. Nobody’d heard “pussycat,” so I felt free to answer to it: “I could have been hurt! You nearly got shot.”
    “And my brave girlfriend saved me. I owe my life to you, baby, and don’t think I’ll be forgetting it. I thought, for openers, maybe I could buy you lunch.”
    The wine had come and I’d drunk half a glass, but I was no less tense than I’d been all morning. “Rob, be serious.”
    “I don’t know what to say, Rebecca.” He looked forlorn. “I’ve apologized about ten times. What else can I possibly do?”
    “Like my mom used to say when I was a kid, you’re not sorry enough.”
    He was silent. “Look,” I continued. “Was a crummy newspaper story really so important you had to risk your life and mine and get me beat up and thrown in jail for it? That’s what’s bugging me.”
    He shrugged, seemingly at a loss. “It’s my job.”
    “You wouldn’t have gotten fired if you’d missed the home edition. Nobody would even have noticed.”
    “The
Ex
would have had it first.”
    “And they’d have been up a creek, wouldn’t they? Because you wouldn’t have talked to them, and I wouldn’t have talked to them, and they’d have had about a quarter of the story, and you’d have creamed them tomorrow.”
    “But it would have been
tomorrow
.”
    “You’re out of control, Rob.” I turned toward the bar and took a big gulp of wine. Then I stared down at my glass, not wanting to look at him.
    “Rebecca, I’ve had about enough from you, you goddam—you, you…
princess
!”
    “Princess?”
    “Yes, princess. JAP. I mean, that’s what you
are
, but you act more like some prissy WASP than anything else.”
    “Oh, great. Slurs on two ethnic groups in the same sentence. Just because you’ve got a foot in both camps and can’t really call yourself
anything
—”
    He started laughing. “You calling me a half-breed?”
    “You calling me a JAP?” I was laughing, too.
    “We’re