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.