Which was a great plan, except that before she could get the coffee, before she could even park at the Inn, she had to drive by Mimi’s, and while she was driving by Mimi’s, she saw that the work of erasing her from the planet had already begun.
Her chicken sign, the one she had painted freehand at fifteen and that had been there, gently peeling, ever since, was gone. The little building was freshly painted in the same old barn red, and someone—Kenneth!—was painting the word “Mimi’s” on a new sign, a white one, leaning against the bench in front.
Amanda wanted to be somewhere else. Now. She would gun the car and drive right out of here and never come back. No, she would swerve right into the building and drive right through it.
Instead, without realizing it, she had taken her foot off the gas. As the car slowed down, Kenneth looked up, and then she did speed up, pressing down the pedal until the sluggish little car shot forward. She kept going past the Inn, where she would never stop again, past Main Street and toward Frannie’s. She drove angrily, jerking the car around the turns, her thoughts churning. That must have been Mae’s doing, although her mom and Andy had to know about it.
And that was what Mae meant, last night, when she gave Amanda that last look, the one that so clearly said, I’ll get you for this.
The sign had been there for so long. It was just the Mimi’s sign now; no one ever even thought about who drew it. And it was one of her first best chickens, a chicken Amanda loved. She had been thinking of Mimi when she drew her, and it had come out in the bird, a certain spirit of determination. It was the first time she’d really been able to see the personality she was imagining come out in a drawing, and it had sent her in pursuit of more chickens to draw. And now the original, the matriarch, was gone.
That chicken was a piece of Amanda, and her sister just wiped it away, just like that.
Damn Mae, with her whole bossy you’re supposed to stay out of Mimi’s and her Ooh, let’s have kale and organic chicken like we’re in Brooklyn thing that Sabrina had described on the way home last night, trying to make Amanda laugh. And she had laughed, because Merinac wasn’t a kale town, and Mae would never be able to get that much organic chicken around here even if she tried. Nobody could spend that kind of money on getting certified, with the ridiculous hoops you had to go through, all set up by the big companies so none of the little farms could manage it. Mae had better not even ask John Calvin Caswell about organic chicken. She’d just piss him off. He’d taken over for his dad almost fifteen years ago, when his parents left for Florida, but his family had been supplying chicken to both Frannie’s and Mimi’s for long before that. The chickens were happy, healthy, and fat right up until the day when they suddenly weren’t. Any suggestion that organic was somehow better would just piss him off.
It would really piss him off.
And when John Calvin was pissed off—Amanda had a sudden memory of him in school, standing frozen and angry when Tom Parker, who had gone to school with them all since they were three but who turned into a real jerk once he made the football team, sniffed the air around John Calvin and declared that suddenly, everything smelled like chicken shit. John Calvin just stood there, staring at Tom while Tom and his friends laughed, making a big deal of holding their noses. And while nobody saw who’d keyed Tom’s Trans Am on both sides in the school parking lot before the end of the day, everybody could guess.
Amanda pulled into the Frannie’s lot without caffeine but with an idea. A brilliant idea. Sabrina, holding a coffee, damn her, was just getting out of her little convertible. Amanda didn’t even bother to park, just pulled next to Sabrina and rolled down the passenger window.
“Hey,” she said. “Want to see something funny?”
Sabrina cocked her head to one side, then slipped into the passenger seat. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see. Well, first to Starbucks. Then you’ll see.”
MAE
Mae swung Barbara’s old truck onto the gravel of Mimi’s parking lot and hit the brakes. She was out almost before she slammed it into park, running across the lot, calling frantically for Barbara.
“Mom! Mom!” Her mother appeared in the doorway of Mimi’s, followed by Andy, Madison, and Ryder. Ryder ran to Mae, and she picked him up, but her attention was on her mother. “John Calvin won’t sell me his chicken.” Had refused to talk to her, actually. Had come to the door, shaken his head at her, closed it, and walked away. Mae was still shaking with fury. Who just locked the door in someone’s face, especially someone they’d known since they were kids? And then let her stand out there banging and calling?
They had a deal, a long-standing deal, that on Fridays and Wednesdays Mimi’s picked up fresh chicken if they needed it. Today’s order was supposed to be bigger than usual, and Mae had gone to pick it up so she could see the Caswell place again. The chicken might not be organic, but it was fresh and free-range and local, raised by the same family in the same way for generations, and that was a great story to tell.
Her mother took off her cooking apron and handed it to Andy. “I knew I should have gone over there. What the hell did you say, Mae?”
Mae glanced at Madison, who was looking deeply interested, and Barbara gave her a look that said “hell” didn’t count as swearing. Mae was too upset to argue. “Nothing! He wouldn’t even let me in the door. I swear, Mom, I never got close enough to talk to anyone. I wasn’t even taking pictures. I wasn’t doing anything.” She had thought about taking pictures, but it was dicey, live chickens in this context. People got upset.
“Come on.” Her mother walked over to the driver’s side of the truck, followed by Madison. “We’re going back over there.”
“He’s not going to talk to me, Mom. I tried.”
“He doesn’t have to talk to you. He has to talk to me. How could you screw this up? What do you imagine we’re going to do now, run over to Whole Foods?”
“I didn’t screw it up!” Mae put her hand on the truck’s hood, still hot, and watched Madison contemplate a vehicle with no back seat at all, let alone no car seats. Mae looked at Andy, feeling desperate.
“Can we leave them with you? Jessa should be here any minute.”
“I want to go too!” Madison opened the driver’s-side door. “Grandma, tell her I can go.”
Barbara started to slide out, and Mae knew instantly that she was planning to put Madison in the middle of the truck’s bench seat. Not happening. She swung Ryder down off her hip, getting some air to avoid his objections. Andy looked unsure, Madison rebellious. If there was going to be swearing, the kid wanted to be there.
Time for the big guns.
“The iPad’s in my bag,” she said to Madison. “If you’ll sit at the picnic table and wait for Jessa, you can watch a show with Ryder.” She lowered her voice. “You can pick,” she whispered. Ryder wouldn’t care, he’d be thrilled by the unexpected appearance of any show, but Madison would.
Madison crossed her arms and looked at the truck, then at her mother, considering. Mae applied the final bribe. “There’s Goldfish.”
“Real Goldfish? Not the healthy things?”
Madison had been on to her since forever. Mae nodded. “Real Goldfish.” Ryder reached up, pulling down at her neck as she bent over Madison and knocking her off-balance. Barbara honked, and Mae shot up into the air and glared at her mother.
“Mae! Now. Get them in the car or leave them, but do it fast.”
Madison took pity on her mother. “Goldfish,” she said to her brother. “In Mommy’s bag.”
Ryder took off toward Mimi’s without a backward glance. “They better be cheddar,” Madison said.
“Parmesan,” Mae said. She always bought Parmesan unless Madison was with her. She didn’t know why. They seemed less—orange.
“Bring cheddar next time,” Madison said as she followed her brother, sounding exactly like Clemenza telling Rocco to leave the gun, take t
he cannoli.
Barbara was backing up, honking again, and Mae ran for the truck. When did she turn into the minion of a couple of godfathers? She grabbed the passenger door and climbed inside, feeling about ten years old. Her mother was never going to believe she hadn’t made this happen somehow. And what were they going to do? She couldn’t even imagine where they would get the chicken they needed besides Caswell’s. They were fucked; they were totally fucked.
She stared out the window as the fields rolled by, some green with tiny soybeans, some the shade of new wheat, one with little rows of corn, just up above the dirt. She really hadn’t had a chance to say anything to John Calvin, let alone offend him. She’d just been driving along the familiar roads, thinking that Jay would love this, seeing where the actual food came from. Caswell’s chicken would fit right into his new one-holistic-life philosophy. No lines between work and life. She wondered how the kids would take the connection between the birds scratching around in the dirt and the ones on the plate. She herself had never known anything different. Grandma Mimi even had chickens, for a while, when she and Amanda were little, for eggs. Amanda still did.
Her mother pulled up into Caswell’s driveway and got out of the truck without saying a word. Mae watched her walk around to the back door, just as Mae had done earlier, disappearing into the space between the house and the old barn, a couple of dogs sniffing around her feet. Past the barn, as far as Mae could see, were the corrugated steel buildings that housed the actual chickens, each with wide doors opened out into separate yards. It wasn’t some sort of idyllic farm scene, with multicolored hens pecking through the grass, but the yards were big and clean and the place used practical, healthy methods to raise birds on this scale. More than once, growing up, there had been rumors that the Caswells would sell out to Tyson, but it had never happened. Surely now, with people more interested in where their food came from, things were easier. They probably did, Mae realized with shock, sell to Whole Foods.
Barbara, looking extremely angry, stalked back around the building, followed by John Calvin in his Carhartts. John Calvin walked toward the big freezer trailer that was parked farther back into the drive, and Barbara got back into the truck and slammed it into gear.
“What? What are we doing?” Mae asked.
Barbara swung the truck around and backed up to where John Calvin was lifting the big latch on the side door. “Come on,” she said.
John Calvin handed Barbara a box. “Grab the next one,” she said to Mae, who was processing. Frozen chicken. John Calvin was giving them frozen chicken.
He stepped down from the trailer, which was plugged into a generator behind the shed. “I got pretty mad,” he said, over the noise. “Our chicken’s good enough chicken for anybody, and your sister said you didn’t think so anymore.”
Mae took the box, putting her hands in the openings on the slightly waxy sides as John Calvin released it. Amanda said—
“But your mom says your sister had it wrong,” he said. “If that’s so, I’m sorry.”
He turned and went back into the trailer, not waiting for a reply. Mae hurried after her mother, carrying the box, which was so cold against her stomach that it hurt.
“Amanda did this,” she said angrily when she caught up.
Barbara shrugged. “Just put the box in the truck,” she said.
“But—”
Barbara turned back and glared at Mae. “Amanda doesn’t matter right now. Just put the box in the truck.”
Mae slid the box onto the open back of the pickup and went for another. With effort, she stifled her urge to shake the placid man in front of her, who was calmly handing her boxes as though he hadn’t just destroyed all of their plans.
Twelve more boxes, and Barbara slammed the gate up.
“Goddamn it, John Calvin, we’re going to have a hell of a time defrosting these.”
“I believe it.” He stood looking after them as they got into the cab. “You take care, now,” he called. “Good luck tonight.”
The minute the doors slammed, Mae burst into speech. “What the hell happened? What are we going to do with frozen chicken?”
Her mother turned the key and backed out of the driveway. Mae could tell by the set of her face that she, too, was angry, but Barbara didn’t answer her until they were down the drive and out on the road.
“Amanda went over there this morning and told him you were planning to switch over to organic chicken, and so he sold her our order.”
“But that’s crazy. I’m not—I didn’t—”
“You must have said something to somebody. Stuff like that gets around, Mae. You can’t just mouth off here.”
“I didn’t! I didn’t say anything to anybody but you and Aida. And that’s not even what I meant! I just wanted to know if it was organic! It doesn’t even matter—this is better than organic.”
Mae knew things got around here; her mother didn’t have to teach her that. She grew up here. And for John Calvin to believe she would mess with a deal between their families that was four generations old was absurd, no matter what Amanda had said. Amanda had gone too far. Way too far. She wasn’t going after Mae anymore but Barbara, and a whole night’s receipts, and she knew good and well that their mother couldn’t afford that.
“I swear I didn’t say anything to anyone, Mom. I didn’t. This was all Amanda.”
“I don’t know what happened or who said what, but that’s what he thinks, and this is what we’ve got, and we’re going to have to deal with it.”
Barbara sat rigidly behind the wheel, turning carefully at the four-way stop, and even as angry as she was, Mae couldn’t avoid the fact that her wild-woman mother, known for flying down the back roads with a cigarette dangling out the window, had turned into a very cautious driver. She was getting older, and Mae didn’t want to think about what that meant—except that it made what Amanda had done even worse. This was playing dirty. She and Nancy both. And Mae hadn’t even done anything. Not anything that would really hurt Frannie’s, anyway.
Not yet.
* * *
×
Safely defrosting whole frozen chicken meant a water bath, and not a warm-water bath, which might work faster, but an ice-water bath. The water and ice had to be changed at precise intervals and precise temperatures. They bought twenty-four white five-gallon buckets and bags upon bags of ice, filled the buckets at the hose, and began throwing the chickens in. The chickens had been prepared for sale, essentially shrink-wrapped, and for a while, they kept them in the plastic, moving them from bath to bath, and dumping the water baths out as the ice melted, but once they were able, they hacked the chicken into fryer pieces and then sealed the pieces into bags and kept going. You couldn’t wear gloves for that work. Only hands could press the chicken breastbone in just the right spot to crack it for the scissors; only fingers could scoop the bloody ice out of the neck and the folds of the skin.
It was miserable, and it had to be done. If they couldn’t defrost the chickens in time, they couldn’t open tonight. The chefs would come and find—nothing. Food Wars was over.
Andy sulked at Mae for the first hour, sharing Barbara’s conviction that she was to blame for this, then cracked a few dark jokes as the whole thing grew more and more ridiculous. Barbara worked in stoic silence, and Mae spent the entire time conducting an imaginary conversation with Amanda that started with How could you? and then listed all of her sister’s sins against their mother and Mimi’s. You’re here all the time. You can see her. She’s obviously getting older. You may be pissed at me, but do you want to ruin her? This place raised you, and you want to burn it to the ground?
She mentally reviewed everything she’d said since she showed up in Merinac. She’d done nothing to John Calvin, said nothing about the farm except to her mother, and that hadn’t been bad, even. She’d been thinking of the farm as part of the Mimi’s story, not something to be ex
cised from it. Because the Mimi’s story was killer. The longer she thought about it, the better it got. Mimi’s was a piece of authentic American history, and the original Mimi a heroine, an early feminist. Frannie’s was a copycat, run by men for most of its years and now so far from its origins that it was unrecognizable, with its long menus and the frozen foods truck parking out back once a week. Cheesecake, biscuits, French fries . . . who knew what else they just yanked out of a bag or box and threw into the oven or onto the plate? Would Nancy and Amanda bother to defrost all this chicken, or would they just say the hell with it and steer customers toward meatloaf and burgers?
You don’t even get what Mimi’s is all about, or what it means to carry on a tradition, she silently told her sister. Mae might have left, but she hadn’t forgotten what was important.
Or how to get along in this town. Mae plunged her hands angrily into another chicken. Mae was doing just fine here, at least temporarily. John Calvin and Amanda aside, nobody around here seemed to resent her for leaving or for her sudden return.
In fact, nobody seemed to resent Mae for much of anything. Not for the kinds of things her fellow New Yorkers seemed to resent other humans for just as a matter of standard practice—being in line for coffee, for example, or having children who didn’t walk in a straight line on the sidewalk. And not for other things, either. Living with Jay had felt like such a minefield lately. She had almost felt as though she needed to hide her work, to write her blog posts when he wasn’t looking, remove the evidence of the little scenes she staged for Instagram and Facebook and smuggle herself off to record Sparkling behind his back. At Sparkling, things hadn’t been much better. As much as she hadn’t wanted to admit it, Lolly and the women around her hadn’t been listening to Mae’s ideas for weeks. Again and again, she had found herself organizing a room or a cabinet that didn’t end up in the final shoot.
The result, she was realizing, had been that she had gone home angry or frustrated. Maybe she hadn’t been a whole lot of fun for Jay, either. Or the kids, who seemed to be loving Merinac. She’d sent them with Jessa down to a shallow wading spot on the river today. That would have been a much more pleasant way to get her hands wet. But no. She was here with the chicken baths, and they weren’t even close to done.
The Chicken Sisters Page 17