The Chicken Sisters

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  Kenneth held out the phone again, this time open to an Instagram post with 14,903 likes. “It’s going to be a gorgeous weekend, too. We should get some road trippers.”

  “I’m putting your special up now,” Patrick said, taking a picture of the flyer arranged on the coffee bar with a fork and knife beside it. “Especially if you amplify”—he gave her a look, and she knew he was fully aware that she didn’t follow them—“you should have more of a crowd than you can handle.”

  Mae, who had assumed her hometown would have essentially no social media presence, now felt like a fool. The posts were well designed, each a thing of graphic beauty, and she suddenly remembered that Kenneth and Amanda had had art in common, although Kenneth took a much more practical approach when he picked web design. She was busted, and she knew it.

  “Didn’t think we had it in us, did you?” said Kenneth, and his eyes were kind. “It’s okay. You’ve been gone a while. I’ll come find you later, after the thing tonight. We’ll catch up then.”

  “That would be great,” Mae said, meaning it. “For now—coffee? Please, Patrick? I’m following you right now. I’ll make up for lost time.” He smirked, but it was a friendly smirk, and Mae felt like she was getting off easier than she deserved. “And maybe a couple of those muffins? We’ll take some to the kids. They’re just at the playground.”

  Patrick returned to his station behind the espresso machine while Kenneth loaded a bag with chocolate chip mini-muffins. As he handed Mae her mocha, Patrick looked over at Barbara, who was heading for the door, leaving her empty cup on the table. “Want me to make some pies to send over tonight?”

  Mae jolted to a stop. This had been going so well—what was Patrick doing? Horrified, Mae waited for her mother’s explosive response to the suggestion that she would need outside pies, but Barbara instead looked thoughtful. “You get started this morning,” she said. “More blueberry, I think. And strawberry rhubarb. I’ll check in on you later.”

  Patrick seemed unperturbed by this opaque response. “Sounds good,” he said.

  Mae, carrying her coffee and the muffins, followed her mother out onto the sidewalk. The fat dog stood up, too, nudging at Barbara’s hand with her square black-and-white head.

  “He’s going to make you pies?” Honestly, if things got any weirder, she was going to have whiplash from all the mental double takes. She ran a few steps to catch up with Barbara, being careful not to spill her coffee.

  Barbara rubbed the dog’s head. “A little after they moved up here, when they were redoing the place, Patrick asked if I could teach him to bake pies like mine, so I did. He’s very good at it now.”

  Mae tried to imagine Barbara and Patrick, side by side, matching rolling pins in their hands. Mae and Amanda were customers of their mother’s pies, just as dependent on her whims as anyone else. Mae dreamed about her mother’s chocolate cream, Amanda loved apple, they would both take a slice of lemon meringue, but Mae hardly dared to request a flavor, let alone a baking lesson. Pies were Barbara’s department, and she accepted no help.

  Well, damn. Maybe Patrick would teach her. If nothing else, it would make a hell of an Instagram post. Which reminded her—she stopped to point her camera phone down into the white bakery bag. The muffins inside glowed, lit by the bright sunlight. Breakfast in my hometown, she typed with a practiced thumb, #yum. She used her keyboard shortcut to add one of her strings of set Food Wars hashtags: #FoodWars #hometowngirl #midwesteats #foodtrip #bestfriedchicken #worththecalories.

  “Good, then,” she said, ready to move on, her mind halfway to Mimi’s already. What if they started outside? Replant the planters, power wash the patio, her mother couldn’t mind any of that, and then Mae would carefully, delicately approach the counter and the rest. “We’ll have even more pies tonight. Sounds like we’re going to need them.” She reshared Patrick’s clever Facebook post of the pie special, text over what must have been an image of pies on the Inn’s counter, then took a muffin for herself. All this talk of pie was making her hungry.

  “We’ll see.” Her mother stopped, still out of sight of the park, and sat down heavily on the bench outside the craft store, which had not yet opened for the day. The dog sat too, then flopped down as though her bulk was just too much to hold up. Barbara looked at Mae, her friendly expression replaced by one of cautious interest.

  “Now, before we go any further, tell me exactly what you have planned, because I know there’s something.” Unexpectedly, Mae heard an echo of Jay in her mother’s words, with the same resignation, and it annoyed her. She made good plans. People just needed to give them a chance instead of getting so caught up in doing things their way.

  “It’s only minor details,” she protested. “We can just get started. And I know you want to see the kids.” Her mother was not a small-children person, but still.

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Barbara. “I saw them at Christmas, in New York, where they were far more interested in presents and their babysitter than me. Today they will be more excited by the muffins, which is fine. Saturday I’ll fry them doughnuts and be the greatest thing ever for about ten minutes. Now, let’s hear it.” She patted the bench beside her. “I’ve had my coffee. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  AMANDA

  Ordinarily, Amanda hated going home to her empty house while the kids were at school. If she wasn’t working the lunch shift, she went anywhere else: Patrick and Kenneth’s, Nancy’s, Walmart. She volunteered, becoming the de facto art teacher for the elementary school, where the teacher provided by the district (who also taught at the middle and high schools) could only get there once a week. She took her sketchbooks and sat on benches and at picnic tables when the weather was warm. Anything to avoid the mess, which never reached Barbara level but still made her feel defeated inside. And the silence. Mostly the silence.

  But after seeing Mae, she couldn’t go anywhere but home. The tears that had overwhelmed her when she saw their fallen tree were threatening to become an all-day affair, and she needed the privacy of her tiny house to pull herself back from the sense that it wasn’t just the tree that was being torn from its roots.

  Mae was so totally not cleaning her fucking kitchen. The last time Amanda saw Mae was here, in her little kitchen, two days after Frank’s funeral. Mae was already packed, already heading home, basically gone, but she stopped in for one last assault on Amanda’s entire life. Sitting at the kitchen table, organizing sympathy cards into neat rows, asking—no, demanding—to know what Amanda’s plan was now. “Action is the best cure for anxiety,” Mae declared, hopping up to straighten Amanda’s counters. In her mind, Amanda, in a burst of fury, had swept everything, cards, blender, toaster, coffee cups, off every surface, raging at her sister that this wasn’t anxiety, it was horror, it was a shit show, it was the impossible meeting the unbearable and crashing into the unthinkable and Mae had no idea, none . . .

  In reality she’d done no such thing. She’d sat and stared down at the linoleum and muttered something, wanting Mae to leave or at least to stop acting like Amanda’s grief was some sort of offense against Mae herself.

  Mae had knelt in front of her, pregnant belly dangling, and grabbed both of Amanda’s hands. “Come to New York,” she said. “We’ll find a place out of the city, where we can afford it, you and me and Jay, with the kids, find you work, get you back into school—help you start again. I know this is terrible, but you’ll get through it. You just need a plan.”

  Amanda shook her head. Frankie, then barely eight, wandered into the kitchen, and Mae reached out and pulled her over. “Frankie, you want to come live with Auntie Mae, right? And Mommy?”

  Frankie, still a little bashful, leaned into Amanda and didn’t say anything. Amanda held her daughter close, pressing the little head into her own chest and glaring at Mae. “You don’t just do that,” she said. “Just—no. Don’t ask the kids stuff like that. We can’t— We’re fine, Mae. Fine without you.”


  Mae didn’t get what it was like to be her. She never had, and she never would. Amanda’s kitchen was fine. She was fine. Amanda dropped her tote bag on the floor, and Mae’s talking points slid out. We’re close but we have our own lives! Amanda snatched the paper off the floor and crumpled it up, quickly, then pushed it deep into the trash.

  There. She’d cleaned.

  She cleared a space on the table, dumping the breakfast dishes in the sink with the plates from last night’s pizza, and turned her back on the kitchen, on the boxes and the curled, ripped tabs from past frozen dinners, on the bottles waiting to be rinsed and recycled, on Pickle’s bowls, still under the counter, on everything that wasn’t right with her world. She sat down with her latest sketchbook, mashing it open angrily on the table. She felt better the minute she had the pencil in her hand, and a chicken chased by a tornado began to take shape on the page, rough and running for a coop that was obviously in the path of the wind.

  You don’t grow up in a small town as “the kid who can draw” without ending up with requests, and as a result, one variety of Amanda’s chickens—she thought of them as the friendly biddies—was scattered all over town. She drew these plump chickens with simple, clear lines, drinking coffee, grocery shopping, and knitting, and traded them for local services, happy to see her biddies take up residence on her families’ menus and on various store posters.

  The rest lived only in her notebook, and those chickens came in every color, shape, and size, including, even especially, the nasty nellies. The ugly chickens, the scrawny, the wild top-knotted, the molting: their stories all lived in here. To begin with, they’d been just single drawings; then they’d grown into panels, still on a single page. Now, just this year, they’d grown again, into a story that transcended a single page, that required her to go back, again and again, trying to map a journey that she hadn’t planned on, creating and re-creating panels and characters and dialogue until she was almost, but not quite, frustrated enough with herself to quit.

  She knew enough to understand that the process of telling a visual story could be easier with a little training. All the college mailings arriving for Gus reminded her that there were places where people learned to do this stuff. It probably was easier for someone with real talent, like Bill Henderson, legendary as Merinac High’s most successful graduate, twenty years before her time. He’d taken his comics of a boy and a penguin and turned them into beloved icons—and then retired and become a total recluse after his success. But he’d gone to art school. She’d checked, damn it. And every time she saw classes in things like illustration and narrative design she had to face it: if she’d finished school she probably wouldn’t be flailing around quite this much.

  She shaded in more of the tornado, a little fiercely, then turned back a few pages and let herself be pulled into the world of Carleen, the least popular chicken in her high school, pecked down by plumper hens and scorned by cocky roosters.

  Carleen’s story wasn’t hers. Amanda had been quite well liked in high school—mostly because she stayed resolutely in the middle of the road, dressing like everyone else, doing the things everyone else did. Amanda had made those choices thanks to Mae, who had already made all the mistakes. Unlike Mae, Amanda did exactly what was expected of her and not anything more. She was a good girl.

  Carleen was not a good girl. She was the dark chicken of her small town, pulling the other chicks in with her schemes and plans when they were young, then finding herself alone as a teenage chicken with a lot to prove and only her mysterious telekinetic powers, powers the others in the flock didn’t share, to do it with. Carleen had been thoroughly rejected and cruelly humiliated by her peers, and would continue to be until she allowed the forces within her to burst free—at prom, of course, in homage to Carrie, one of Amanda’s favorite books—and annihilate the chickens around her in a rampage of oil and flames.

  Carleen, Amanda thought, would end her prom night with a fried chicken dinner.

  Amanda stayed deep in her notebook for as long as she could, until she looked up at the clock and had to rush wildly to pick up Frankie and Gus for the night’s filming as promised, leaving her work spread out across the table to clean up later. She arrived at Frannie’s with a funny sense of carrying along a mood that wasn’t entirely hers: Carleen, crushed to the point of drastic action and ready to rumble.

  She, Amanda, was feeling better. Her greeting from Sabrina reassured her that Mae was entirely off base in her assessment of Food Wars and its plans. If Sabrina had secret designs she would never be so warm and welcoming. Amanda might have spouted off at the mouth a little in her first interview, but she herself had no secrets, and she hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true, anyway. The relief made her bouncy, and Carleen’s determination was giving her confidence. With an unusual, pleasant sense of being fully in control of the situation, she hung up her bag, then joined Nancy and Sabrina at the bar to go over table assignments.

  “These tables are the ones where we’ve got the spacing just right for the camera,” Sabrina said. “Can you split that section up, just for tonight, so we can see two of your team in action? And I’ll help Amanda seat it, so we get a variety of customers. No sending in ringers to talk the place up on my watch!” She laughed, but Nancy looked horrified, whether at the idea of splitting the front section or cheating, Amanda didn’t know.

  Amanda could see that Nancy was concentrating on trying to even out the table assignments, and thus the tips, so she agreed with Sabrina on her mother-in-law’s behalf.

  “Great.” Sabrina made a mark on the pad she was carrying. “Now, are you guys doing anything specific for tonight? A Food Wars deal, an appetizer or a drink special?”

  Amanda thought of the Mimi’s special, dinner plus pie, which she’d seen all over Instagram. They could do so much more than that, but she didn’t want to imitate Mae in any way, either. She drummed her fingers on the table, thinking, while Nancy got up to take the new table map to the hostess stand. “Not a dessert special. Mae’s doing that. And if it’s food it has to be chicken, and those are already our best deals . . .” Trust Mae to have already taken the easiest idea. What could Frannie’s do that Mimi’s couldn’t?

  She had it. “Drink specials,” she said. “Alcohol and virgin, too. Like, a Food Wars theme.”

  Sabrina looked thoughtful. “Not bad,” she said. “But what about something a little more competitive? Mae was saying last night that she wanted to bring a little Brooklyn to Mimi’s. You could kind of play up that you don’t need to change anything. I mean, I know she’s your sister, but it’s all in good fun, right?”

  Amanda felt a wicked urge rise in her. “We’ll give the drinks local names. Sex on the Prairie. The Missouri Mule.” She saw Mary Laura walk in and called to her. “We’re renaming your cocktail menu tonight, ML. It’s the anti–New York drinking fest.”

  “Ooh,” said Mary Laura. “The MOhito, like Missouri MO. The Soured on the City.”

  “Long Way from Long Island Ice Tea,” said Amanda. “Or here’s one just for Mae—the Not-So-Sparkling wine. Because we don’t need making over.”

  Sabrina ripped a sheet of paper off her pad with a grand gesture and handed it to Mary Laura. “Your menu for tonight, then,” she declared. This was perfect, except that Mae might never even hear about it. After the morning, Amanda wanted to rub Mae’s nose in the distance between Mimi’s and Frannie’s—and between Mae’s idea about what people wanted and the way things really were around here.

  “How can we make sure everybody knows?” she said. “People around here would come in just for the drinks, but all we can do is put it up on the sign outside.”

  Sabrina gestured with her phone. “Put it out there,” she said. “Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Get it on all your accounts now and set it to keep going all day.”

  Amanda shook her head. “We don’t do that,” she said. Amanda loved Instagram, but she was
more of a follower than a poster, and Nancy had long been adamant that it wasn’t Frannie’s style. We don’t need to advertise, she’d said, quoting Daddy Frank, even when they clearly did.

  Sabrina sighed. “You’re going to have to start,” she said. “But for now—get those guys at the coffee shop to do it. The 1908 Standard. They’re probably one of the biggest accounts in the state.”

  Amanda picked up her phone, then hesitated. Kenneth was fundamentally loyal—and he’d been sharing Mae’s special all over the place, even if she had been dissing him for years. But didn’t he want Food Wars to succeed for the town, not just Mae?

  Sabrina, irritated, took the phone from her hand. “You can even put it on their Facebook page yourself,” she said. She started arranging bottles and glasses into a cluster on the bar and handed Amanda the chalkboard they always used for drink specials. “Write up a couple and make them beautiful,” she said. She opened Amanda’s camera app and looked through it, then started carrying the bottles to a table closer to a window.

  Amanda started to letter quickly. Frannie’s Proud Flyover Country Drink Specials, she wrote across the top, then listed their genius drinks. She sketched in a cocktail and handed it over, and Sabrina propped it up behind her improvised photo studio.

  “There,” she said after a minute, handing the phone back. “I put it on their page. Ask them to spread it, and send them the Instagram shots and some tweets.” Amanda took the phone, trying not to reveal her confusion, and as Sabrina walked away, Mary Laura slid the phone from her hands again.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. “I’ll tell them it’s me.”

  Amanda smiled at her, relieved. “I mean, tell them it’s me, too. It’s all of us.”

  From then on, the night sped up. There were no more one-on-one chats with Sabrina, only a few awkward moments in front of the microphone to offer a cheerful take on how the night was going, which was great. Given how many people there were at Frannie’s, there couldn’t be many at Mimi’s. She’d had a hard time holding on to their usual corner table for the Aarons, who came in every Thursday with their three boys after baseball. Sabrina wanted to give it to a big, noisy crew who must have come over from the local college, but Amanda held firm and slipped her loyal customers past the crowd in the bar, where they were making it abundantly clear that they loved the drink specials—and, Amanda knew, would order another round while they were waiting.