Dark Wild Night

“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.”