“Who knows when that would be? I’m literally bursting to tell you my news!” my mother cried out, giggling excitedly.

I chuckled in spite of myself. My mother was many things, but her enthusiasm was always hard to resist.

“It must be big news; it’s late back there. Why aren’t you in bed?” It was almost eleven back east: way past her bedtime.

“Eh, I’ll sleep when I’m dead. Listen, Roxie, I’ve got something fantastic to tell you!”

“Phish is touring again?”

“Roxie . . .” she warned.

I bit my lip to keep from saying something snarky. “You found a new brand of wheat germ and you can’t hide your excitement?” Lip biting does not, in fact, always work.

“I’m so glad you enjoy making fun of your mother, especially with your generic hippie quips. You’re very quippy tonight,” she replied, her voice getting a bit sharp.

I needed to ease off a bit. After all, it wasn’t entirely her fault that I’d been fired.

“Your news?” I asked sweetly, before she could go off on a tangent about maybe the reason I was so quippy is that I wasn’t getting enough iron. Or sex. Typical mother-daughter stuff.

“Right! Yes! My news! Are you sitting down?”

“Yes, I’m sitting down.”

“I’m going to be on television!” she burst out, ending in a squeal.

“Oh, that’s nice. Is Craft Corner back on the air again?”

Our little town in upstate New York had its own public access channel, and Mom had been contributing ideas for years. Every now and then, when the budget hadn’t been cut in half to seventy-five dollars, they’d ask her to come on and demonstrate. How to make a sweater dress, how to make a ceramic birdbath, etc. Her segment on Jiffy Pop paper lanterns generated the most calls the station had ever received. Three.

“No, no, not Craft Corner. Ever hear of The Amazing Race?”

“Sure, sure. Is Channel 47 doing a local version?” I asked, turning into my parking lot.

“It’s not Channel 47, dear, it’s the actual show! I’m going to be on The Amazing Race—the real one!”

“Wait, what?” I asked, swinging wide into my spot and almost taking out a trash can.

“You heard me right! I auditioned for the show last fall when they were in Poughkeepsie, with your aunt Cheryl, and they picked us! We’re going around the world!” she yelled.

“Okay, stop shouting. Mom, seriously, stop—okay. Okay, hello?” I tried to get a word in edgewise, but it was impossible. She was spouting names of cities and countries right and left, her voice getting ever more excited. Cairo. Mozambique. Krakatoa.

“Krakatoa? You’re going to a volcano?”

“Who knows, that’s the whole point! They could send us anywhere! I’m going on a quest!”

“With Aunt Cheryl? She got lost in the new A&P. What good is she going to be on a quest?”

“Oh, don’t be such a pill, Roxie,” my mother said, and I could feel my shoulders tensing up—like they always did when she took this tone.

My mother was a “free spirit,” and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why her daughter was such a stick-in-the-mud. A stick-in-the-mud who, since she was fourteen, had made sure the lights stayed on, the gas didn’t get turned off, and there was always food in the pantry. Still, I was happy for her.

“Sorry—it sounds awesome. Really, I’m excited for you,” I said, envisioning my mother and her sister trying to navigate a bazaar in North Africa. “When does all this happen?”

“Well, that’s the thing, sweetie. We leave in two weeks.”

“Two weeks? Who are you going to get to run Callahan’s?”

“Who do you think?” she asked.

She wasn’t— No, she couldn’t possibly think that I’d leave my— No, she would never . . . Hell yes, she would.

“Are you insane? Like, ‘check you into a place without forks’ insane?”

“Just hear me out, Roxie—”

“Hear you out? You want me to leave my business, which is finally starting to get somewhere, to cook in a run-down diner in Bailey Falls, New York? While you go off on some geriatric ‘around the world in eighty days’ bullshit?”

“I can’t believe you would call me geriatric—”

“I can’t believe that’s the word you heard!” I exploded. As I sat in my car, eyes bugging out of my head at my mother’s audacity, my phone vibrated with a text. “Explain to me how you think this can work. How can I do this?”

“Easy. You take a leave of absence out there, you drive to here, and you run the diner while I do this.”

I took a breath, held on to it for a moment, then let it out slowly. “A leave of absence.” Breathe in. Breathe out. “I work for myself. So a leave of absence means a leave of no more business. A leave of unemployment. A leave of, ‘hey, clients, get someone else to cook for you. I’ll be up to my elbows in tuna noodle casserole back home in Podunk.’ ”

“We don’t make that casserole anymore.”

“We have to discuss your selective hearing sometime,” I said as my phone vibrated with another text. “Mother, I have to go. We can—”

“We can’t talk about this later. I need to know if you can do this or not.”

“You cannot call me up out of the blue and ask me—”

“Wouldn’t be out of the blue if you called more often,” she sneaked in.

Breathe in. Breathe out. I suddenly understood the phrase “my blood was boiling”: I could feel bubbles of stress forming inside my veins, knocking around and heating me up from the inside. I was a little past simmer, getting close to parboil. Before I could go fork tender, I tried once more.

“Here’s the thing, Mom. I need you to be reasonable. I can’t do this every time you get into trouble or—”

“I’m not in trouble, Roxie. I’m—”

“Maybe not this time, but it’s the same thing, just dressed up in a package from CBS. It’s not going to work anymore.”

“I paid for your college, Roxie—two years at the American Culinary Institute. The least you could do is this.”

Okay. That’s it.

“You know what, Mom? No. I’m not doing it,” I said angrily, just as another freakin’ text came in. “And you only paid for ACI because you’d just won the lottery. And you’ve gone through the rest of that money already, which is ludicrous.”

She remained stubbornly silent. This was usually the point in the conversation where I’d cave. But not this time.

“Okay, Mom. While you’re figuring out the real meaning of life and jumping into a shark tank off the coast of South Africa with Aunt Cheryl—who can’t swim, by the way—I’ll be here. In Los Angeles. Working my ass off, trying to build a business and keep my own lights on so I don’t have to live in my car,” I snapped—as yet another text came in.

“You really think they’ll make us go in a shark tank?”

“Oh, go smoke a bowl, Mother!” I hung up, steaming, wondering how in the world she could be ludicrous enough to think I’d drop everything to go home and run her diner. Unbelievable. I had a life, I had clients, I had . . . good lord, another text?

I looked down at my phone, which showed six messages waiting for me. Nope, seven—another one just came in. What was going on? Opening the first, I saw it was from Shawna, a client.

Roxie: I won’t need you to cook for me next week.

Huh. That was weird. I opened the next bubble.

Sorry for the last-minute notice, but I’m going to have to cancel the meals you have planned for next week, and the week after that. I’ll contact you in the future, perhaps.

Wait, what? Miranda was another client. She’d been with me for a few months, referred by . . . Mitzi. Ah shit.

I opened the next text bubble. By the time I’d read them all, every single client Mitzi had referred to me had canceled. Backed out. Quit me.

Over B U T T E R???

Or maybe over the obscene finger gesture?

I fucking hate this town.

Referrals were everything in a town like this, and because of Mitzi St. Fucking Renee, I was now a culinary pariah. Vapid, plastically beautiful women with more money than actual God had had decided to make my career into a game of herd mentality. The few clients I had left only used me occasionally, for events or as their schedules allowed.