Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig howandanswer.com. NS
Answer
howandanswer.com. 5 NS neil.ns.cloudflare.com.
howandanswer.com. 5 NS rosa.ns.cloudflare.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0