"I brought you some strudel for your birthday," she said. "Not apple. It's nut. The best I ever made. You' gonna wish you had more."

"Well, Rosie, how nice!" I lifted a corner of the napkin. The strudel had a nibbled look, but she hadn't snitched very much.

"It looks wonderful," I said.

"It was Klotilde's idea," she said in a fit of candor. Rosie's in her sixties, short, top-heavy, her hair dyed the utterly faux orange-red of new bricks. I'm not certain what product she uses to achieve the effect (probably something she smuggles in from Budapest on her biannual trips home), but it usually renders her scalp a fiery pink along the part. She had pulled the sides back today and affixed them with barrettes, a style much favored in the five-year-old set. I'd spent the last two weeks helping her find a board-and-care facility for her sister Klotilde, who'd recently moved to Santa Teresa from Pittsburgh, where the winters were getting to be too much for her. Rosie doesn't drive and since my apartment is just down the street from her little restaurant, it seemed expedient for me to help her find a place for Klotilde to live. Like Rosie, Klotilde was short and heavyset with an addiction to the same hair dye that tinted Rosie's scalp pink and turned her tresses such a peculiar shade of red. Klotilde was in a wheelchair, suffering from a degenerative disease that left her cranky and impatient, though Rosie swore she'd always been that way. Theirs was a bickering relationship and after an afternoon in their presence, I was cranky and impatient myself. After checking out fifteen or sixteen possibilities, we'd finally found a place that seemed to suit. Klotilde had been settled into a ground-floor room in a former two-family dwelling on the east side of town, so I was now off the hook.

"You want to come in?" I held the door open while Rosie considered the invitation.

She seemed rooted to the spot, rocking slightly on her feet. She becomes coquettish at times, usually when she's suddenly unsure of herself. On her own turf, she's as aggressive as a Canada goose. "You might not want the company," she said, demurely lowering her eyes.