Then they reached the tables serving the food, and she realized that she was really hungry. She'd skipped lunch to do her shopping for the Western outfit and hadn't eaten anything since a hurried breakfast in the hotel coffee shop. So when the man carving thick slices off the steaming chunk of tri-tip asked, "Two slices or three, miss?" she smiled and said "Three, please. I skipped lunch today."
'This should make up for lunch, then," he said as he sliced three thick pieces and laid them on her plate, their centers pink and their edges darkly crusted with the spices which had been rubbed in and the sauce basted on as the final step in cooking.
One fragment of meat had dropped away from the slices, and Laura sneaked it off her plate and into her mouth as she carried the plate along to the next table to get the baked beans. The taste was indescribably good, nothing like any beef she'd eaten before, and the texture surprised her with how tender it was. She could understand now how she'd be able to cut the meat using only the serrated plastic knife in the package of utensils, and the sample of meat she'd eaten made her eager to get started. But first, one aproned woman ladled a big scoop of savory baked beans, with fragments of onion and bacon visible, into a second compartment on her plate, and a second woman used large tongs to fill the third compartment with crackling-fresh salad. Laura chose blue cheese from the selection of dressings available on the last table and drizzled some lightly over her salad. Unlike the vegetables she usually ate, which had traveled many miles and days to her grocery store in Montreal, the lettuce and other vegetables in the salad had been growing in fields in the Salinas Valley only yesterday. She knew she didn't need to spice up or disguise the taste of this salad with a lot of dressing.
Monty had followed behind, loading up his plate too, and pointed to a couple of empty seats where they could sit to enjoy the meal. And they did enjoy their evening meal to the fullest, both the excellent food and each other's company here in the Cow Palace on Cattlemen's Day.
Little did they know that a disgruntled former employee of the Cow Palace had finished his evening meal at about the same time, nor could they have had any inkling that information would have any meaning for them.