Текст книги "Nuts"

Автор книги: Alice Clayton

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Chapter 2

I woke up the next—hmm, let’s say afternoon, so I’m not a liar—with my face covered in lime pulp and stuck to my leatherette easy chair. I checked the clock. Nice—I’d managed almost four hours of tequila-assisted sleep. A good night, when I usually only averaged about three hours a night. Suffering from intermittent insomnia since grade school, I’d adapted to less sleep than your average chicken.

I stumbled to the kitchen, reached blindly for the coffee, refusing to think about being fired. For B U T T– —oh, forget it. Yawning as the coffee percolated, I scrambled eggs with some tomatoes, garlic, spinach, and a touch of crème fraîche. I grated a little pecorino over the finished product, snatched a piece of perfectly toasted challah bread from the toaster, then grabbed my coffee and went back to the leatherette.

As I munched, a tabloid magazine on the table caught my eye. My guilty pleasure. I propped them up on a recipe stand while I was cooking sometimes. As I deboned a roasting chicken, I’d catch up on who was boning who in Tinseltown. But this morning, I realized I knew the person on the cover. She was a client. And I’d like to think maybe a friend?

I first heard of Grace Sheridan when the entire world was focusing on her other half, Jack Hamilton. An incredibly good-looking young British actor, he’d been the darling of the media world for a few years now, and just as his star was beginning to really rise, the press was constantly speculating on who the hot new movie star might be dating. As the world discovered that this unidentified redhead was actually Grace Sheridan, an actress as well, the media flurry became a storm, especially when she announced to the world they were a couple by taking him by the hand and publicly claiming him as hers on a red carpet. I knew all of this from what I’d read online. But when she called me one day to ask me to cook for her while getting ready for a new season on her hit TV series, I began to know the woman behind the magazine covers.

She was funny. She was sweet. And she loved food. And—I was cooking for her later today. Crap! I’d completely forgotten about my actual existing client, one who was expecting me for dinner tonight. I took five minutes to scrub my face, pits, and bits, threw on some clean clothes, grabbed my knives, and raced to the market.

I’d cooked for Grace on and off for the past year. She was a big foodie and loved to cook, so she only used me when her schedule got too demanding. Two actors in one house, both working crazy hours when they weren’t on location—having a private chef was a perk to some people and a lifesaver for others.

Grace had been very outspoken in the press about her up-and-down weight, and she took her figure very seriously. Jack? Took it even more seriously . . .

The first time I met Jack Hamilton he’d been stealing as many kisses from his fiancée as he was carrots from the salad bowl I’d been working on. I was a bit giddy, being so close to such a big movie star, but giddy and a paring knife don’t work so well together, so I sucked it down and cooked an amazing meal. So amazing that I became their occasional private chef.

I power shopped through the market, grabbing things I knew she’d like. Arugula. Frisée. Shallots. Lemons. Hanger steak. Jerusalem artichokes. Prosciutto. Bosc pears. A lovely slice of English cheddar. Because, bless my buttons, Jack and Grace liked dessert. In a town that frowned on dessert. So into the cart also went flour, sugar, eggs, and gorgeous, wonderful butter.

An hour later found me in the sunny kitchen of two of Hollywood’s brightest stars, spooning pound cake batter into two loaf pans and shooshing Grace over to her side of the island.

“It doesn’t make sense for you to pay me money to cook if you’re doing half the work.”

“I’m like your sous chef,” Grace protested as I pulled out a kitchen stool and pointed at it.

“Sit down, relax, stay on your side of the kitchen, and I’ll let you lick this.” I held up a beater.

“It’s a good thing Jack’s not home yet; he’d never let a line like that go by,” she said with a chuckle. “But I do want to lick that, so I’ll stay over here.”

I smiled as I thought about how I held sway over one of television’s biggest stars with just a battery beater. Why couldn’t all my clients have been like her? It was silent for a few minutes while she read through a script and I worked on my lemon cakes. But she couldn’t keep quiet for too long . . .

“So they all just canceled on you? Just like that?” she asked, looking up from her papers.

I kept my eye on my loaf pans. “I shouldn’t have told you. That was incredibly unprofessional.”

“It was also incredibly unprofessional when Jack offered you a threesome for another serving of spotted dick. Unprofessional is how we roll.”

I snorted in spite of myself. I’d made a traditional English pudding one night, and Jack the Brit was beside himself. So beside himself that he really had offered his body in return for future proper English sweets.

I really shouldn’t have unloaded everything on Grace, as nice and as welcoming as she was. But somewhere between the grocery unpacking and the artichoke pruning, she’d guessed that something was bothering me. And before I knew it, the entire story had poured out.

“So your mom wants to go on The Amazing Race, huh?”

“Ugh, yes. Ridiculous idea.”

“I don’t know, I’ve seen the show a few times. Always looks fun.”

“Oh, it’s not that it doesn’t look fun. It’s just . . . hmm . . . how to explain my mother.” I paused, rapping the loaf pans against the counter to coax any air bubbles out before placing them in the oven. “She’s an eighties hippie. She got caught up in that whole second-wave thing.”

She nodded. “I remember that. Buy your peace sign earrings at Contempo Casuals.”

“Exactly.” I handed over the promised beaters and she began to lick. “But it stuck with her. She’ll tell you she’s a free spirit. I have another word for it.”

“Flakey?” she asked.

“Yep. Irresponsible. She means well, but when you’re all about the moon being in the seventh house, it’s hard to remember things like paying the electric company to keep the lights on in the actual house. Luckily, she had me. Not to mention the countless ‘uncles’ who were constantly around.”

“Ah,” she said, switching to the other beater.

“They were all nice guys; she just hated being alone. So she made sure she never was. She fell in love with any man who bothered to look twice at her.” My mother was convinced that every single man she met was The One. Or at least The Next One. And I’d seen the aftermath countless times when the guys eventually bailed, the carnage that was left behind. The crying, the yelling, the sugar bingeing, the Van Morrison playing endlessly on the record player. And then the inevitable mooning over the next guy who wandered into her hippie love snare.

“So she’s a romantic?” Grace asked.

“You say romantic, I say codependent.” I rinsed the pears in the sink. “You say romantic, I say afraid to be alone. You say romantic, I say why in the world would someone put themselves through the hassle and the heartache?”

This is exactly why I liked my relationships simple, full of sex and free of love. My trouble sleeping was a great reason to ensure men never spent the night, since it was hard enough for me to fall asleep when I was alone. Compound insomnia with another snoring human in the bed, and I’d literally never sleep. Plus, I saw no reason to stare at a man awkwardly all night after the exercise portion of the evening had concluded, so I sent them on their way. They didn’t seem to mind, and I avoided all the bullshit.

Grace looked thoughtful for a moment, and I could see her mind working. “Okay, so you don’t approach things the same way . . .”

I shook my head. “Besides my mother’s search for love everlasting, the only constant in our lives was the diner. I need a better handle on my life than that.”

“Your family’s diner?”

“Yes, my grandpa opened Callahan’s a thousand years ago. I started washing dishes there when I was ten, maybe? Gotta love that child labor. When my grandpa died, it went to my mom. It’s nothing special, just kind of a meeting place in a small town.”

“Sounds great.”

“It totally is—that’s where I realized I wanted to make cooking my career. But I never wanted to run it, not even for a short period of time. Do you have any idea how much goes into running a barely successful family restaurant? Forget vacations. Forget freedom. Forget a peaceful evening. And even if you’re home, you’re fielding calls about a broken-down mixer or a walk-in fridge that’s leaking, or a waitress whose nail broke off in the salad bowl and should we close the place down until we find it?” I sighed, exhaling the tension that always set up shop when I thought about our charming slice of Americana.

“Plus forget about having any kind of privacy—in a town like Bailey Falls, everyone knows everything about everybody. You are who you are, and they don’t let you forget it. I spent my entire childhood living in my mother’s flakey shadow, waiting to be eighteen and move away from home just to get the chance to be a kid. So for my mom to think I’d just drop everything and run home . . . oh, it just pisses me off.”

“I can tell. You’ve peeled that pear down to the core,” she said gently, and I looked down. I had indeed.

“Oh for the love of—” All the peel was piled up in the sink, along with all the pear. “I’m so sorry, this is terrible. Let’s talk about you—what’s going on with you?” I swished all the peel down the drain and started on a fresh pear.

She gave me a look that told me we weren’t done with this, but she’d play along. She told me all about the new season of the show, then told me a few secrets from the set of the new Time movie Jack had just finished, a successful film franchise based on a series of erotic short stories. A time-traveling scientist schtupping women across time . . . not a bad way to spend an evening at the movies. By the time dinner was almost ready, I’d almost managed to forget that other than this wonderful client, I was now a private chef without a private kitchen.

I was just taking the steak out of the pan and setting it to the side to rest when headlights shone through the back window as a car swung into the driveway. I turned to see Grace beaming as bright as the headlights, even blushing a little. “Jack’s home.” She seemed so genuinely happy that I had to smile too, even if she did remind me of my perpetually lovesick mother for a moment.

I looked around the kitchen, with its warm honey wood and giant marble island. Pictures of the couple and their friends hung on the walls, not fancy artwork. Flowers spilled casually out of mason jars and Bakelite pitchers—no enormous florist arrangements in this house. Because it wasn’t just a house, it was a home. Unlike any of the other houses I’d cooked in. Grace and Jack were that impossibility in this plastic town: real people. I missed real people.

But I didn’t need to be the third wheel for the remainder of their real-people evening. So as Jack banged in through the back door, I gathered up my tools.

He immediately called to his fiancée, “C’mere, Crazy, I’ve been waiting to get my hands on you all—oh! Hey, Roxie.” Jack smiled lazily over the top of Grace’s red curls as he tucked her in for a hug. “I forgot you were here tonight. Smells great, what is it?”

“Sliced hanger steak marinated in a little coriander and soy sauce, sliced on a bed of baby arugula and frisée, with roasted Jerusalem artichokes tossed lightly with lemon juice and pecorino cheese,” I said, taking their plates to the table. “Jack, you’re also getting prosciutto-wrapped bosc pears and a big slice of your favorite English cheddar. Grace, you just get pears.”

“How come she doesn’t get fancy pears too?” he asked, sitting in his chair and trying to pull Grace onto his lap.

“I don’t get fancy pears because I have a sex scene to shoot in two weeks,” she said lightly, planting a kiss on his cheek and barely escaping his grabby hands.

“And since I’m skipping the fancy pears, I get to have cake later on,” she said, digging into her salad. “And I might have licked the beaters.”

“Wish I’d been here to see that,” Jack said under his breath.

I shook my head and quietly finished cleaning up the kitchen as they ate their dinner. Which they loved.

After I poured lemon honey glaze over the still-warm pound cakes and prepared to go, Jack and Grace began imploring me to stay.

“You should have some cake with us,” Jack said, moving easily around the kitchen.

Jack Hamilton with an armful of Tupperware: I could sell that picture to a magazine and never have to work again.

“Can’t, but thanks for the offer. I’ve gotta get home and figure out some stuff,” I said, sliding my last knife into its sheath just as my phone rang. Unreal timing, my mother. I’d deal with her later.

“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.