“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.