“Everything okay?” he asked, concern in his warm eyes.
Unbelievably, I felt my eyes burning a bit. I swallowed hard around the sudden lump in my throat.
“She’s good. I’m going to walk her out,” Grace said, looping an arm through mine and heading toward the back door.
“Brilliant dinner, Roxie, really excellent. Thanks again,” Jack answered, whistling as he turned his attention back to rearranging the inside of the fridge.
I breathed in a huge, watery sigh as I headed out into the night air. “I’m so sorry about that. I don’t know what came over me just now.” I sniffled a bit, dabbing my eyes as we walked out toward my car.
“You’ve had a shitty day—it happens. Talk to your mom.”
“She’s just going to talk me into doing this for her,” I said, setting my things in the back of my car.
“I hate to say this, because it’d mean your pound cakes are leaving—but maybe you need a break. Maybe this would be a good idea. Get out of town for a while, clear your head.”
“If I leave, I’m leaving everything.”
“You already lost most of your clients, Rox,” she said. “Except for us, of course, your favorites.”
“Of course.” I sighed. “You know why I love cooking for you?”
“Because you get to stare at Jack?”
“Obviously. But other than that, I miss cooking real food. Homey food. Calories be damned.”
“Real food in the real world. I hear that.” Grace laughed. “Call your mother, talk it out, and decide what you want to do. Even if you leave, you can always come back.”
“Oh, I’d come back. It took me eighteen years to get out of that tiny town—there’s no way I’d stay there for good,” I said, shaking my head. Population two thousand and thirty-crap?
“Great! If you come back—sorry, when you come back—I’ll put the word out. We know tons of people who could use a great chef, none of them plastic. It’ll all work out.”
“Go eat your cake. I presliced some for you, exactly three ounces. No more,” I said, climbing up into my Wagoneer.
“We’ll see,” she said with a wink.
A few minutes later, I was halfway down the canyon. As soon as I had reception, I called my mother.
I listened to what she said.
Then I went home and looked at my stack of bills, and compared that to my now nonexistent income.
I called my mother back.
“Roxie, it’s after midnight.”
“I’m coming home, Mother. I’ll run the diner. You’ll pay me your salary. For exactly as long as it takes for you to run around the world on your quest with Aunt Cheryl. And then I’m done. No more favors. Ever. Clear?”
“Oh yes! Thank you, you fantastic daughter of mine, thank you! When will you be here? Can you be here by—”
“I’ll call you in the morning and we’ll work all that out, okay? You won, Mother—enjoy it.” I sighed, hanging up and lying back onto my bed.
Shit. I was going home.
A week later, I had sublet my apartment, packed up the Wagoneer, told my boy toy that I’d be gone for the summer and sadly without his company, and pointed the car right.
I mean, east.
Chapter 3
Driving across the country alone can be boring, especially at the beginning of a trip. Sorry, Nevada. Sorry, Utah. I enjoy what you offer the world, the gambling and the Osmonds, but when you’re feeling unsure about your life choices, the desert isn’t a great place to drive through alone for hours on end.
On the other hand, with only the cacti, the sand, and an actual buzzard to bear witness, the desert is the perfect place to roll down the windows and sing “Sweet Caroline” at the top of your lungs. I even did my own backup vocals, giving each bah bah bah my all, with some swerves across the yellow line as a dance element.
It’s possible the desert was getting to me.
But it kept the memories at bay. Memories that were fluttering around the edges between the songs. Thinking about spending some time back east, and maybe seeing my best friends Natalie and Clara, got me thinking about when we all met and that particular time in my life.
I’d left home for the American Culinary Institute in Santa Barbara, convinced it would be the cannon that would shoot me out into adulthood. The place where I’d finally find the life and the life’s work that fit me. I could focus on myself without my mother’s perpetual disasters or the awkwardness of high school holding me back.
I’d been a shy kid, embarrassingly so. Belonging to neither the jocks nor the geeks, the freaks or the brains, I lived in a kind of interstitial no-man’s-land. It’s not like there’s a high school clique comprised of food snobs. It’s not like there’s tons of kids spending their weekends perfecting goat cheese tartlets¸ or holding olive oil tastings in their backyard.
I did both.
I was shy; I was all elbows and knees and blushing as soon as someone looked at me. I fumbled my way through my first serious make-out session with a foreign exchange student from Finland after getting tipsy on smuggled aquavit. He touched my boobs and I liked it. But then I threw up. He never called again.
I once managed to get the zipper of my coat attached to a knot in my hair at lunchtime and spent five minutes trying to free myself, before calmly (I hoped it looked calmly; it felt anything but) eating the haricots verts tossed with almonds and Gruyère that I’d brought from home, trying not to notice the staring from classmates. I once tripped and fell down a flight of stairs in front of my entire class, landing with my skirt around my waist.
I once checked the wrong box on my elective class assignment, and instead of signing up for the Taste of the World parade of culinary delights, I signed up for debate class, and spent an entire semester fearing an egg timer and flop-sweating my way through “The Missouri Compromise—Or Was It?”
When I graduated, I was determined to shed my wallflower persona and redefine who Roxie Callahan was. To decide what kind of person I wanted to be, how I wanted to present myself to the world. And the beauty of going away to school is that no one has a preconceived idea of who you are.
Plus, at ACI I was in the exact environment I was supposed to be in. I was with people like me. We got excited when a new box of foie gras arrived, we salivated when truffles were in season, and we got downright horny when we learned how to caramelize chicken skin for a garnish.
And speaking of horny . . . Let’s speak of horny. I enjoyed the horny times. Culinary school was a fondue pot of sexual tension, and we were all dying to get speared and forked. Along with the confidence that came from learning to cook well, I gained confidence in my body. I might still be elbows and knees, but I finally gained some cleavage and a sweet ass, thanks to the freshman fifteen.
The frizzy brown hair became sleek and bouncy after being introduced to some smoothing treatments. The California lifestyle gave me a nice tan year-round, and the freckles that I’d tried to fade with lemon juice when I was a kid became a nice frame for my eyes.
I had friends, and some of the friends were boys. And boys were fun. After seeing my mother moon over every guy with a passing resemblance to Tom Selleck (no idea), I did the opposite. I flirted and flounced and enjoyed the shit out of my newfound empowerment to become physically, but never emotionally, entangled with whichever guy I set my fancy on.
Because Roxie Callahan wasn’t going to go down the same path as her mother, bouncing from relationship to relationship with a kid in one hand and a Harlequin romance novel in the other, saddled with a usually in-the-red diner and waiting for the next man to sweep her off her Birkenstocked feet. Uh-uh. I had a career to craft.
Which I did. When my instructors gave me feedback, I thrived. I saw what they saw—the little tweaks here and there to make the difference between executing and mastering a technique. To understand how a splash of champagne vinegar at exactly the right time could elevate a recipe, but if added only a moment later it would muddy and cloud an otherwise acceptable
dish. That was pure perfection. I spent hours in those beautiful stainless steel kitchens, blending ingredients, playing with flavors, savoring the process: all the things you don’t actually get to do when you’re working in a restaurant kitchen.
Though I knew what a diner’s daily grind was like, I believed that once you raised food to an art form, the artist had time to work. But not so. Being an executive chef in a Michelin-starred restaurant—the goal of every culinary student—was not all it was cracked up to be. It was staffing, and payroll, and management, and critics, and reviews, and front of the house, and back of the house—and yeah, occasionally you got to get lost in your kitchen and cook. So I found myself adrift: in love with the process of creating food, but convinced deep down that the restaurant life—that hectic schedule, cooking under constant pressure, never having any freedom—was not for me.
But I sucked it up, enjoyed the opportunity to cook beautiful food while it lasted, and graduated with honors. And offers. Offers to apprentice and work in some of the finest and most innovative restaurant kitchens in the country, even abroad.
But I knew I wouldn’t be happy. It wasn’t glamor and fame I wanted, it was the opportunity to create. I hated the stress of the day-to-day operations of a professional kitchen, so with some guidance from a professor, I chose the quieter life of a private chef.
It was the best decision I could have made. There, I could excel, let my food speak for itself. Sometimes I’d find myself giving a client tips here and there: tricks of the trade on how to make sure piecrust always came out flaky, how to caramelize but not burn onions, and how to carve a chicken. In the age of the boneless and the skinless, people under forty had never learned the things that now only chefs and older people knew how to do. And I enjoyed the “teaching” aspect of my job a lot. It was the “something extra” I could offer to make them feel like hiring a private chef wasn’t just a luxury, but something invaluable.
I stayed in California, moving all over the Golden State whenever the mood struck, or a new client beckoned. Santa Barbara, San Diego, Monterey, finally settling in Los Angeles. I’d always heard you learned how to say no in your thirties, so my twenties were all about saying yes. To a new job, a new town, a new experience. Unless it was illegal (mostly), dangerous (really), or had to do with butt sex (not going to happen), I rarely said no.
I rarely returned to Bailey Falls, preferring to have my mom visit me out west. I liked my life, I liked the new Roxie, and I was determined never to return to Wallflower Roxie again.
But while I sidestepped the stress of working with overbearing executive chefs and the drama of bartenders sleeping with waitstaff, I didn’t sidestep the stress of being solely responsible for making sure that the checks kept coming in. My livelihood depended almost entirely on referrals, and though I’d worked my ass off to build my business, I had no security. No automatic paycheck every week. No medical. No dental. No promotions. No family. Restaurant family, I mean.
This thought brought me back to the present, where I was driving across the country to bail out my mother. I turned up the radio and concentrated on staying between the lines.
On day three I pulled into a roadside restaurant that proclaimed it had the World’s Best Pork Butts. I was familiar with the marketing; every diner in the world had a claim to a particular culinary fame. World’s Best Coconut Cream Pie, World’s Best Fried Pickles, World’s Best Scrapple . . . that last one belonging to our diner. You don’t even want to know what scrapple is; it’s about three rungs below Spam on the evolutionary scale.
But I appreciated the way this dive threw their Butts right up onto the billboard, and I was hungry for some good BBQ. I was halfway across Kansas, close enough to Kansas City that it should be good.
It was good. Sweetly spicy like all KC barbecue should be, the butts were shredded and piled high on an open-faced roll, the meat tender with the right amount of chew, the flavors balanced perfectly.
On the side? Burnt ends. Find them. Seek them out. Go to the middle of the country right now for a plate of them.
The diner was old-school Americana. It had the right smell of chili seasonings, home fries, and that faint scent of grease that hung in the air no matter how thoroughly the grease traps were cleaned out. And the diner came complete with something that was almost impossible to find these days, but used to be a staple: a “Flo.” An honest-to-goodness, pencil-in-her-hair, pantyhose-wearing Flo.
“You want anything else, sugar?”
I smiled at the little old lady who had walked a million miles in those Reebok sneakers and never slipped on a mushed pea. “I’m good. Thanks for the recommendation on the cake; it was terrific.”
“Sour cream. That’s the secret,” she smiled, placing my check on the table. “Makes all the difference in the world. It’s not just for baked potatoes, you know.”
“You don’t say,” I grinned, letting her tell me her diner wisdom.
Twenty minutes later I was back on the road with a full tummy, a new recipe for mocha chocolate fudge cake, and a sudden soft spot for a good old diner.
By the time I made it across the New York State line, I was in a very different state of mind. I was sick of driving, sick of peeing in truck stops, and already sick of being home—even though I wasn’t technically home yet. Two hours later, when I began the slow, gradual climb into the Catskill Mountains, I was so tired and cranky that no amount of chirping birds or late-season tulips bordering the two-lane country highway could lift my mood. And when I turned off the highway and onto the main drag of Bailey Falls, the quaint banner that hung from city hall, proclaiming that the annual Memorial Day parade would be held in just a few days, and the charming red, white, and blue bunting draped across porches and hung from telephone poles and lampposts, failed to charm me.
On autopilot, I drove past the grand homes on Main Street, the still-grand homes on Elm and Maple, past the smaller but neat-as-a-pin cottages on Locust and Chestnut, past the quiet ranch homes in the subdivision on the outskirts of town, over the railroad tracks, and back out into the country. The houses were farther apart now, some with adjoining farms, some stranded in a sea of rusted and busted-out cars forever on blocks.
Finally I turned onto the long winding driveway, gravelly and pitted, lined with flower boxes painted in Day-Glo yellow, orange, purple, and pink. Here and there, signs propped up in the flower boxes shouted motivational messages in neon green:
LESS TROOPS MORE HUGS
A WOMAN NEEDS A MAN LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE
NO DAY BUT TODAY
Pretty sure that last one was a line from Rent. My eyes rolled, a conditioned response. As I bumped down the driveway, reading the new signs mixed with the old, I tried to see her as others might see her. Happy. Positive. Eternally optimistic.
I still saw the woman in overalls with a flower behind her ear who brought me my lunch bag when I deliberately left it at home, telling me in front of all of my friends to make sure I didn’t pick off my bean sprouts from my sandwich, that I needed the fiber for my constitution.
Mortifying.
I drove around the last bend in the driveway and found myself in front of my childhood home. Though it had been a few years, it looked exactly the same. Two-story clapboard with peeling white paint. Expansive front porch covered in half-finished art projects. Whirlybirds and pinwheels scattered across the front lawn, which could use a good mowing. At least three different paint colors had been tried out here and there on the side of the house, all abandoned when something else had caught my mother’s attention. Knotholes where woodpeckers tap-tap-tapped right on through, and occasionally brought their friends the squirrels. Always nice to wake up to a scurry in the walls.
But home was home. I parked the car, dragged my luggage onto the porch, and debated whether to knock. On the front door of the house I’d lived in since I was three days old.
Screw the knock, I thought, and turned the handle.
It was locked.
So I knocked.
No answer.
Are you kidding me?
I marched through the backyard, past the signs encouraging me not to worry but to be happy, and dug for the key that still lived under the planter by the back door. I knocked once more, then let myself in.
Every house has a smell. You can smell it when you visit someone’s house for the first time. Sometimes it’s good, like cinnamon and clean laundry. Pecan rolls and pipe tobacco. Sometimes it’s bad. Febreze and cabbage. Curry and hamster cage. Stale pizza and dead skin cells. (If you’ve ever been to a college guy’s apartment then you’re familiar with the latter. Like I said, every house has a scent.) And that scent tells a story. You usually can’t smell your own home, unless you’ve been on vacation for a while and manage to get a quick whiff when you first come home. Or if you moved away for several years.
One deep breath and I was home. Steel-cut oatmeal. Borax. And patchouli. I looked around and found it exactly the same as it always was. Same Camp Snoopy water glasses drying by the sink. Same white-and-brown ceramic mushroom canisters lined up on the counter. Same bicentennial plates hung from the wall, although Rhode Island seemed to be missing.
“Mom? You home?” I called, knowing she wasn’t.
And suddenly I was pissed. I’d driven across the entire country, walked away from my own business (my fury didn’t care about facts), and shown up so she could race around the world. And she wasn’t. Even. Home.
I banged back out the door, jumped into my car, and headed back into town. It was Monday morning. I had a good idea where she was.
When I pulled into the back parking lot of the diner, I swung into the slot beside her car. Wood-paneled cars ran in the family, and there was no mistaking her 1977 station wagon with the Darwin bumper sticker. And the faded Vote Mondale/Ferraro! sticker that still lingered.
I grabbed my purse and barreled through the back door into the kitchen, straight into a scene I’d seen a thousand times. Tickets flying. Bells dinging. Feet running. The door to the walk-in fridge banged as people ran in and out. Vegetables chopped. Pans sautéed. An army of retro-looking waitresses (we had our own Flos) barking orders and bringing food, dressed in pink and green polyester dresses that perfectly matched the seat covers. There was a certain rhythm. There was a certain madness. There was also laughter—and mostly from my mother.