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.

She stood in the center of the Fantasia-like storm, her dirty apron tied back expertly, her frizzy, gray-streaked hair whisked back into a bun, wearing a broad smile as she expedited orders, ran food, and shouted special requests left and right: “For Table 16 I need two dots and a dash, two eggs wrecked, a club high and dry, and a cowboy with spurs.”

She caught my eye over the chaos, and a second later I was wrapped in a bear hug that would take out a quarterback. I hugged back, unable to stop the laugh that popped out. Mostly because all of my air was forced out at once. Mostly.

“Roxie, you’re early! I thought you’d be here this afternoon, or even tonight. When did you get in?”

“Just now—I was so close last night that I just decided to keep going.” “I’m so glad you got my note.”

“What note?” I asked as she pulled back to look me over, eyes assessing. “On the front door, that I was working the early shift. How else did you

know I was here?”

“I guessed. And there wasn’t a note, Mom.” I shook my head.

“Sure there was. I taped it to the front door on my way out this morning, when I . . . Oh shoot, here it is,” she said, shaking her own head at the piece of paper she pulled out of her apron.

Roxie—I’m working the early shift, come on down. So glad you’re here!

“Oh well, you’re here! That’s all that matters! And not a moment too soon; we are in the weeds. Carla called in sick at 4 a.m. so I had to come down to open up this morning, and one of our dishwashers quit last week and I haven’t had a chance to replace him. Did you bring your apron?”

“Bring my— Mom, I literally came straight here after driving all night and

—”

“No trouble, just grab one off the wall. I need to get moving, those beans have been sitting in the window too long as it is, talk when the rush is over? Thanks, sweetie!” she called out, turning to yell to Maxine, one of the oldest waitresses. “Those whistle berries are getting cold, get those out to Table Seven on the double!”

“Stuff it, Trudy! Hiya, Roxie! Great to have you home again!” came the response, and the chaos resumed.

I stood in the center, wondering what had just happened.

“You remember how to peel potatoes? We’re getting low on fries and I’d love to get ahead before the lunch rush,” my mom chirped as she sped by me, turning me toward a mountain of potato sacks.

“I know how to peel potatoes, for goodness’ sake,” I mumbled testily, realizing there wasn’t any way I was getting out of this. My mother was already heading back to the front counter, shouting over her shoulder to “Burn one, run it through the garden, and pin a rose on it.”

“It’s faster just to say burger with lettuce and tomato,” I told the potatoes, which looked back at me blandly. Because they had eyes, you see.

I grabbed a clean apron off the wall, grabbed the least dull and least likely to cut me knife from the block, and started filling a hotel pan with water to soak the cut potatoes. We served steak fries at the diner, thick cut and big enough to fill a hot dog bun, should someone choose. But that didn’t mean they couldn’t be perfect steak fries. So I settled in with my paring knife, peeling and slicing and lining them up with perfect uniformity. I dug out eyes, trimmed away green, and lost myself in the details.

As shouts of black cows, Eve with a lid on, and burn it echoed around me, I concentrated on the slippery right angles, making sure they were perfectly edged before going into the water bath.

My mother buzzed over to grab the first pan of ready-to-go spuds, and she looked on curiously as I concentrated on removing a stubborn peel. “They’re

gonna get covered in gravy or dipped in ketchup—they don’t need to be a work of art, Rox.”

“You told me to peel potatoes. This is how I peel potatoes,” I replied, tossing it into the pan as she turned to go.

“Light a fire, or we’ll never get ahead of this,” she instructed, and I rolled my eyes. “I saw that!” she called out.

“I meant you to!” I pulled another pan down and filled it full of water. “Light a fire,” I mumbled.

Now I had a quest: to make a perfect steak fry, fast. I shut out the noise and the clatter and bent my head to the task. Hands flew, pruney fingers danced, and the pan filled with starchy, pointy art. Time flew by as I filled pan after pan, the sacks dwindling.

When one of the other waitresses patted my shoulder in greeting it startled me, and my knife slipped from my hand, landing in the back of the water pan. Leaning across the pan to retrieve it, I overbalanced and managed to submerge my front in cold potato water. “Bleagh,” I said, feeling the cold water running down the inside of my shirt and across my belly. Paused from my fry frenzy, I looked around. There were pans of fries on every work surface in my corner. Huh. Might have gone a little overboard.

“Land’s sake, Roxie, how many fries did you think we need?” my mother asked as she came around the corner.

“They’ll keep until tomorrow—the next day, even,” I replied, a little sheepish.

“It’s fine, I’ll make some room in the walk-in. How about cleaning some sugar snap peas?” she asked, thunking down a big pan of pea pods. “Cut off the end, strip out the stringy part.”

“I know how to clean a sugar snap,” I grumbled. “Cut off the end . . .” I filled the pan with water, huffing, “Strip out the stringy part. No shit, strip out the stringy part.”

“You start talking to yourself out there in Hollywood?” my mother teased, sticking her head around the corner and very nearly getting hit in the face with the snap pea I threw at her. She laughed and disappeared back into the kitchen.

I sighed, stretched, and went to work again. After this, I was taking a nap. After a while I became aware of a tingling on the back of my neck, and I looked over my shoulder to find the source. Then several things happened

within mere seconds, though I saw them in super slo-mo:

1. A man was standing right behind me.

2. He was holding a basket.

3. The basket contained some lovely walnuts.

4. I shrieked, because he was standing right behind me.

5. I dropped my pan.

6. Snap peas shot out in all directions.

7. Some of the peas landed on his work boots.

8. I looked above the boots. Jeans.

9. I looked above the jeans. Vintage Fugazi concert tee. Green flannel shirt.

10. I looked above the flannel. Two weeks’ worth of shaggy blond beard. Mmm. Country hipster.

11. I looked above the beard. Lips.

12. I looked at the lips.

13. I looked at the lips.

14. I looked at the lips.

15. COME ON.

16. I looked above the lips.

17. I was glad I looked above the lips.

18. The eyes and the hair were a package deal, the hair was falling across his eyes in a careless way that said “Hey, girl. I’ve got peas on my shoes, but who cares, because I’ve got these eyes and this hair, and it’s pretty fucking great.”

19. The hair was the color of tabbouleh.

20. His eyes were the color of . . .

21. Pickles?

22. Green beans?

23. No. Broccoli that had been steamed for exactly sixty seconds. Vibrant. Piercing.

24. I stood—and slipped on the snap peas.

25. At his feet, I stared up at him.

26. One corner of his mouth lifted for the tiniest moment.

27. He looked at my nearly transparent wet T-shirt for the tiniest moment before decency dictated that he not do that.

28. He set down his basket of nuts and extended a hand to me. Callused. Rough. Both corners of his mouth now lifted.

29. I took his hand to stand. Slipped again on a snap. Worlds collided when my skin met his. Heads collided when my forehead conked his.

30. One of my pea pods wedged under his boot

31. He fell down too.

32. His nuts went everywhere.

33. Our legs tangled.

34. His head fell into my . . . lap.

35. Sugar snap peas were my new favorite vegetable.

The guy with the nuts was named Leo. I know this because when my mom came around the corner and caught him facedown in her daughter, she cried out, “Leo!” and rushed to help him up. Him. She never could resist a good- looking man. And once the man was extricated from between my legs . . . mercy . . . he reached down once more to try to help me up.

“For goodness’ sake, Roxie, what’re you doing on the floor?” my mother interrupted, lifting me up underneath both arms and plopping me back on my feet like a flour sack.

“I . . . uh . . . well . . .”

“I think I surprised her, Ms. Callahan,” this Leo said, his voice smooth and rough at the same time. How is that possible? “You okay?”

“I . . . uh . . . well . . .” Where was this coming from? I don’t stammer.

He grinned, a look of curious amusement spreading across his entire face.

“She’s totally fine, aren’t you— Oh dear, it looks like the turkey’s done; you might want to cover up,” my mother said, looking at a very specific part of my chest.

I looked down, remembered that I was on full transparent display here, and quickly crossed my arms over my wet chest. Where my nipples had popped like Butterball turkey timers. My mother, ladies and gentlemen.

“Roxie, go get a fresh apron, and then come sit with Leo here and have a cup of coffee. You’ve got time for coffee, don’t you, Leo? It’s the least we can offer you after you ended up on our floor!”

Coffee suddenly sounded like the best idea in the history of best ideas.

Coffee? Yes. Lay on top of me again? If you must.

“Sorry Mrs. C, can’t stay for coffee today. I’ve got a truck full of deliveries to make before five. Rain check?” he asked, unleashing the grin of the ages on my mother, and then turned his grin on me. “You sure you’re okay?”

Absolutely okay. I didn’t get weak in the knees anymore just because a cute guy looked at me, even if my turkeys were done.

I looked up at him through lowered lashes, cocked my head to the side, and let loose my own grin. “Sorry about your nuts.” Then I slowly walked toward the walk-in fridge, putting a tiny extra sway in my hips.

Inside the walk-in I allowed myself ten seconds of teenage cute-boy- freak-out, getting caught in a fist pump when my mother poked her head inside to see if I was okay.

“If you’re done in here, there’s a bunch of snap peas on the floor that aren’t going to clean themselves up,” she said with a knowing grin.

Face flaming, I left the walk-in.

But spending the summer back home just got a little more interesting.