We are at a McDonalds in Las Vegas, Nevada.

By we, I mean me, my husband, David and I. We’re waiting for our foster children’s biological parents, Chrissy and Jay.

This McDonalds is dismal. Meth-Donalds, I call it secretly, because later in the evening, it’s often filled with tweekers shooting up in the bathroom or sliding through their heroin highs and lows over coffee. Or maybe it feels dismal-as-fuck because what we are doing is dismal-as-fuck. We are stuffed into a tiny booth, David and me on one side, jammed up together, the seat across from us dead-empty. The table is sticky. There are french fry bits all over the seat.

And Chrissy is late.

Chrissy is always late. And not by a little. Not like 5 minutes or something. She is 45 minutes late to everything. But I get why she is late this time. This is not going to be fun. This is the thing she has been running from.

“I’m sure they’ll have rice there,” I tell my 14-year-old vegan, Lucy.

We’re driving to a friend’s house to eat Mongolian food. I’m confident Lucy will be able to eat something at this dinner. I am so confident I don’t even bother to pack the little just-in-case containers of nuts, fruit, and crackers that tide her over.

In this city of restaurants, we’re on a journey into home kitchens. We’re visiting home cooks, tasting their food, eating at their tables. Each time I eat and cook with someone in their home, I go with expectations of what it will be like. Each time, I am wrong.

Today, at Nara and Corey’s house, I will be wrong again. Twice, in fact.

The kitchen is a place that yields all kinds of surprises and information about the people who cook there. It’s an excavation site. An anthropological dig. The rituals of cooking help with these discoveries about people…

Mrs. Bun: What have you got, then?

Waitress: Well there’s egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and Spam; egg, bacon and Spam; egg, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, bacon, sausage and Spam; Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam; Spam Spam, Spam, egg and Spam …

— “Spam,” Monty Python, 1970

Raffi, my 7-year-old son, is lounging on the couch, playing Zelda on his Nintendo Switch, lobbing chunks of Spam into his mouth.

Raffi loves Spam. Because back when he lived with his biological parents, before they lost him to foster care and adoption, they kept him alive on it. I message Jason, his first dad.

He jokingly admits it’s all his fault. “I eat Vienna sausages and Spam out of the can all the time,” he tells me, as I watch my son in his underpants, a bare leg slung over the arm of the couch, eating straight out of the can.

My friend, Jolene, brings over a canned artisan cocktail from a local restaurant. She leaves it in the planter at our front door. Social distancing and all that. She texts me to let me know.

I’m thinking about drinking it.

But the routine is embedded in me now. I put the can in the fridge to get cold. David will enjoy this, I think.

I can say no to a drink.

David takes the cocktail out a bit later, pours it into a whiskey glass with fat chunks of ice. I can be with him now while he drinks. But it wasn’t always this way. A year ago, I couldn’t imagine a day without booze. An evening even.

But coming up on January 10, 2021 I will have been mostly-sober for a year. Still, sobriety is liquid. Fluid. What it is and what it means is constantly changing. To be sure, sobriety is a tender tender thing.

The first time I meet Chris Preston and his son, Ty-Jon, it’s in the Smith’s parking lot. The one on Sahara and Maryland. He asks if he can help me load my groceries for some change. I have 20 12-packs of sparkling water and a heap of groceries in my cart, and I have some cash. I appreciate the help. I want to get everything loaded, get in the car, switch on the air-conditioning.

I know the minute I see Chris in the sun of a full-throttle Vegas summer, heaving soda into my car, that he is a cool guy. He is not afraid to work, obviously. And his eyes are kind. Sweet and dopey. In fact, it’s his eyes that relax me and prompt me to ask questions while he loads 12-packs into my trunk. Sweat is dripping down his face. And my back. It’s 115. I’m just standing in the parking lot chatting.

“I’m a cook,” he says, grabbing bags. Ty-Jon joins us. “I got laid off at my bar. I’m tryin’ to get enough money together to move my family out of Motel 6 and into a weekly.”

My kids made me breakfast last Mother’s Day. There’s a pretty good chance they’ll do it again this year.

I’d be stupid to say they did it for me, really. Mother’s Day was an excuse to get in the kitchen and go crazy without having me in there butting in with my rules and safety concerns, my constant nagging not to stick their fingers in their eyes after they chop the jalapenos, my desire to use one bowl and not five.

I’m not going to lie. I was freaking out.

I imagined what every mother/home-cook imagines from her bed/prison on Mother’s Day—my kitchen being dismantled piece by piece, my progeny unloading cabinets, burrowing through spices, dishes breaking, boxes and bins clattering to the floor, a completely up-ended kitchen that would require a half-day of heavy cleaning and re-organization.

There is a meth addict eating chicken yakitori on our back patio.

Actually, we are all eating chicken yakitori — me, my husband, David, our girls, Lucy, who is 10, and Edie, who is 8. And Charlie, the guy who is working on our house, who has four days clean.

It’s a fall day in Las Vegas. The sky is clear. It’s 72 degrees, which is like a small miracle if you are from New York City. Which we are. It feels good to see the girls in shorts, and to eat on the back deck, while the Northeast is frozen under the Polar Vortex.

David and I lived in New York City for 25 years both together and separately. I know that city like it’s my skin, but something is happening — I’m starting to like living in the Mojave. I like the hot sun and wide-open skies. I like that a few months in, I’ve found my people — artists, writers, circus people, Elvis impersonators, lounge singers, weirdos. Vegas is full of weirdos. That’s part of its charm.

I barely miss New York. It shocks me to even write this.