The Chicken Sisters

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  In the video, Mary Laura answered her angrily. “There is no way Amanda would do something like that. Mae, maybe. You sure you didn’t make a mistake?”

  Then Kenneth: “There’s no way she’d take Mimi’s recipe. This is a girl who once found the answers to a biology test on the teacher’s desk and made me drive her to the teacher’s house so she could give them to her and explain.”

  Even Zeus, the dishwasher at Mimi’s, who had a child in Frankie’s class. He looked intently at the camera. “You better be careful. That’s a serious thing to say. She would never do a thing like that. She’s a real good person, Amanda.”

  And finally there was Andy, shaking his head. “I tasted the chicken. I know it’s the same. But Amanda— No, I’d never have believed it if you’d told me. I still can’t—” He looked away from the camera. “Look, I’m pretty upset about this. Just go away. It’s a game to you, but it’s not a game to me.”

  Amanda hadn’t realized she was holding her breath until she let it out in one long exhale. Her first thought—They all know?—was slowly replaced by a little warmth growing inside her.

  “I could not find one person in this entire town who believed you’d steal that recipe,” Sabrina said. “I couldn’t even find anyone who believed you’d get a parking ticket, basically, unless your meter expired while you were rescuing a kitten from a tree. Not one, not even our hero, the hunky chef, or anyone else at Team Mimi’s. So. I’ll send it to you. You can watch it whenever you feel like shit.”

  Amanda handed the phone back to Sabrina. Her relief was like a balloon. She felt as if it could lift her right off this little trail and up into the sky. Sabrina might have believed Amanda was a thief—who knew if she believed anything? The chefs maybe. But nobody else. Or almost nobody. “Mae believes it,” she said.

  “Yep. And I’m still going to have to do something about it,” Sabrina said. “Can’t just leave it hanging out there. Simon and Cary both agreed with Andy—they were pretty embarrassed they hadn’t spotted it, actually—and of course it’s not like Mae’s going to let it go.”

  It wasn’t over, then. Amanda’s relief evaporated as Nancy, who’d been listening to them both as if waiting for the conversation to make sense, finally spoke. “Wait. What recipe?”

  “The chicken recipe,” said Sabrina. “I don’t know how, but you season your fried chicken exactly the way Mimi’s does. Somewhere along the line, somebody ripped off the recipe, and Amanda’s suspect number one, thanks to her little dalliance with Andy the other night. But nobody really thinks she’d do a thing like that. So”—she shrugged—“you be the judge.”

  Nancy knew that, though— No. Amanda could tell from Nancy’s face that she hadn’t known, and that didn’t make any sense at all. But what really didn’t make sense was that Nancy didn’t look one bit surprised.

  Instead, she laughed. “The seasoning? Seriously? That’s what’s going on here?” Nancy leaned forward and grabbed Amanda’s hand.

  “Come with me,” she said, and spun them both toward Mimi’s and Barbara’s house. “I can clear this up.”

  Sabrina put her phone away and turned to them, an interested look on her face. Amanda would have sworn that her ears perked up.

  “Not you,” Nancy said. “I meant what I said about you. You’ve been pushing buttons all along, Sabrina, and you don’t get to push this one.”

  Sabrina looked at her. “I could hold you to your contract, you know. You have to let me film if I want to, or we can void the whole thing.”

  “Your contract also says we don’t have to reveal trade secrets,” Nancy said.

  Sabrina appeared a little taken aback, and Nancy laughed again. She almost seemed to be enjoying this, and now Amanda was even more confused.

  “What, did you think I didn’t read it?” Nancy said. “I’ve had enough of you, Sabrina. I think we’ve all had about enough. You’re in too far with us, anyway. You won’t leave. You’ll find out soon enough, but you’re not coming now.” She gave Amanda’s hand a little tug, then let go. “Come on. The city slicker can find her way out, I’m sure. And don’t look like that. I can’t help whatever else is going on with you, with Mae and Andy and all the rest, but this recipe-stealing business? That I can fix.”

  * * *

  ×

  Amanda raced after Nancy and flung herself into the passenger seat of her mother-in-law’s little hatchback. Nancy threw the car into reverse, turned it, and spun out of the Mimi’s parking lot, driving fast, a determined expression on her face. Amanda, though, needed to slow down. She had had enough of feeling like she was on a Tilt-A-Whirl gone mad, and wherever they were going could wait. Had to wait. As they left Main Street behind, she reached out and put a hand on Nancy’s arm. “Could you stop for a second?”

  “I know you didn’t steal the recipe,” Nancy said. “I can prove it.”

  “But that’s not the only thing that’s wrong,” Amanda said. “If you didn’t know about this last night—why were you so angry? Where are we going? And—Andy—I need to explain.”

  Nancy pulled off, a little too suddenly, at a spot on the road where the shoulder widened a little, a pull-off for balers and hay wagons to head into the fields that lined either side of the road. She answered the easiest question first. “We’re going to Frannie’s,” she said to Amanda. “And I was angry about your mother, of course. Still am. I can’t believe you’d hang her out to dry like that, no matter how she’s treated you.”

  “Mae said I stole the recipe for the seasoning on the chicken,” Amanda said. “On camera. In front of everyone. Andy said”—she hated even saying his name—“Andy said he tasted it yesterday, and now Frannie’s chicken is exactly the same as Mimi’s—and he says it wasn’t like that before. I didn’t plan to tell them about Mom. I was just so angry.” Amanda prepared herself for the next question: But how would they think you got the recipe out of Mimi’s? She would have to admit it, that she had been in there, with Andy. Dallying, as Sabrina put it.

  But Nancy didn’t ask the next question. Instead, she gripped the steering wheel and stared out into the flat Kansas sunlight. “I should have known there was more to it,” she said. “You wouldn’t do that without what felt like a good reason, and that part is my fault. You don’t need to explain. I do. But it’s easier to show you.”

  Amanda didn’t know how to respond to that. What was there for Nancy to explain? Needing something to focus on, she flipped her phone over in her lap, and there it was, the message from Sabrina, with the video. Watch it whenever you feel like shit, she’d said, but it wasn’t going to help the way Amanda was feeling right now.

  No one was angry at her. Even Nancy, it seemed, was ready to believe Amanda was just a victim of circumstance. She had a clear path back to her job, her family—everything she had been beating herself over the head for risking for the past twenty-four hours.

  But Nancy was wrong. Amanda was the one who had started all of this, and she had started it because she was already unhappy. She had been papering over so much, for so long. For that one morning, when it felt like her whole world had crumbled, she had felt miserable, yes. Crushed. Lost. Alone.

  But she had also felt something else, something she hadn’t even been able to sense until it was gone.

  Free.

  If everything was blowing up around her, she didn’t have any choice. She was going to have to do something else and be someone else, somewhere else, and no one could blame her for it, not one bit.

  Instead, the smoke was clearing. What she had taken for bombshells had just been fireworks, with a lot of boom and sparkle and no damage done. She turned to Nancy, who seemed to feel they’d paused long enough; she had her hands on the keys and her foot on the brake. She’d drive Amanda right back to Frannie’s, unless Amanda did something about it.

  Unless she blew something up herself.

  “Wait,” Amanda said. “
I do need to explain.” She reached out and took Nancy’s hand, pulling it away from the keys, and then held it there between them. A wisp of cloud slid overhead, changing the light to shade and lifting, for a moment, the heat that had been growing in the stopped car. She stared out the windshield, aware that she was squeezing Nancy’s hand hard, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “I miss Frank.” That was a terrible place to start, because now she was already gulping back tears. “I loved our life together. Working at Frannie’s, with him, with you, Daddy Frank—”

  Nancy squeezed her hand. “I know, honey. I know. This part—you don’t have to explain. It’s time for you to move on.”

  Amanda shook her head. “No. You’re not— That’s not all. This is not about Andy, I’m not talking about that, that was just—” What was it? She couldn’t sort that out right now. “This is about us, about Frank, about you and me. You’re my family now, Nancy. Like, really my family.”

  “And you’re my family. I just don’t want you to lose your mom and Mae.”

  “Don’t you think I already have?” Amanda was still swallowing tears. “It’s you I’m worried about, Nancy. I love my life, I am so grateful for all I have, I don’t want to mess it up—but—” This was so hard, it was like standing at the edge of some terrifying cliff, but Amanda felt as though she’d been standing at the edge for too long.

  “I did all this, I know,” she said. “I brought Food Wars here, I went a little nuts trying to win—and now—I don’t want this anymore. I don’t know if I ever did. Even when Frank was alive, I wasn’t—all in anymore. He knew it. I applied to art school in Kansas City. I was going to commute, but he didn’t think it would work. We were fighting. He thought I was unhappy, and I was, but not with him.” Not with him, maybe with him . . . That was the one thing that really didn’t matter anymore. “We were trying to figure it out, and I want to think we would have, but I just don’t know. And then he was gone . . .”

  Tears started running down Amanda’s cheeks, and Nancy reached for her, but Amanda gently pulled away. She wanted to find comfort in Nancy’s arms, but for the first time, she knew she wanted something else more.

  “I love you so much, Nancy. I don’t want to lose you. If I’m not at Frannie’s, if I do something else, I don’t even know what, but something—would you still, I mean, how much would things change between us?”

  It was too much to hope that Nancy would understand. Amanda could barely understand it herself. Because it just didn’t fit together. If she loved her life, and Frannie’s, and Nancy—if she’d loved Frank, and raising her kids—why would she want something else? It was what she’d been asking herself, yelling at herself, for months. Did wanting something more mean you regretted everything that led to what you’d got?

  Nancy turned to her but paused before she spoke. “You don’t want to work at Frannie’s anymore?”

  Amanda couldn’t take it. She thought she was ready, but she wasn’t, not really, not to really be on her own. “I do, I mean, I kind of do, it’s not exactly that I don’t want to—”

  “No, don’t take it back. You said something. You don’t want to work at Frannie’s anymore. You want to do something else. And you’re afraid that will make me less your family.” Nancy sat back in her seat, and then suddenly, with resolve, started the car again and pulled out into the road. “I can fix that too. Sometimes I think you don’t even know what family is, Amanda. Of course you won’t lose me if you don’t work at Frannie’s. There’s nothing you could do to lose me, and I need you to know it—and then I need you to really know it, and to be it, with your family. Because what I’m asking myself, Amanda, and what Gus might ask, or Frankie, is—does that mean there’s something I could do to lose you?”

  “No!” Amanda was horrified. Did Nancy think she was disloyal after all?

  “No? Not have a messy house, or compete against you to win something, or maybe make you jealous?” Nancy looked hard and quickly at Amanda before turning her eyes back to the road. “Not if I let you down somehow?”

  “You would never let me down.” Amanda understood what Nancy was saying. Kind of. But it was different. Her mother and Mae—they weren’t there for her. So how could she be there for them?

  “You don’t know that, Amanda. You can’t know that, and maybe you never learned that everyone screws up, sometimes. But we’re going to Frannie’s. There’s something I need you to see. And then we’re going to find a way for you to give your mother and Mae another chance, and for them to see what they’re doing, too. Because this recipe stuff—all this stuff we’re doing—this is ridiculous.” She set her lips in a thin line, and the car sped up. “Ridiculous.”

  Amanda started to say something else, to defend herself, but Nancy waved her off. They were there, pulling into the familiar parking lot, which Amanda could already feel growing strange. She wanted to leave it behind, but she would miss it, too. Things already felt changed, no matter what Nancy said, and what Amanda felt most was uncertainty, and a deep conviction that Nancy wasn’t going to let her find an easy way out of it.

  Nancy got out of the car fast and walked toward Amanda. As their eyes met, Nancy spoke quickly, as though she’d been rehearsing her line.

  “What makes you think I’d want to run Frannie’s without you?”

  She turned, and before Amanda could answer, if she’d even known what to say, Nancy was off, briskly striding over the broken-up asphalt toward the restaurant where, in Amanda’s mind, she reigned. Amanda followed Nancy to the kitchen, saying hey to the cooks at the break table and to staff straightening up at the boss’s appearance, trying to look like they hadn’t been slacking off during the usual lull between lunch and the early-bird crowd.

  Nancy marched past, through the empty kitchen toward the back wall and the old built-in cabinets, only about ten inches deep, that lined it. She opened the one that was filled with extra containers of salt and various spices and emptied a shelf at eye level, then slid her fingers behind the thin light blue painted panel behind it and pulled.

  The panel came off in her hands, and from behind it, Nancy took out what looked like a card wrapped in plastic and handed it to Amanda.

  It was a half sheet of lined paper, old, covered in a flowing, spidery script that gave Amanda a shock of recognition. The yellowing cellophane crackled in her hands as she took it.

  Fill a large cake pan with flour up to your first knuckle, then salt well. Add pepper until mixture is well spotted, then add three large pinches nutmeg, one pinch mace, pepper again. Dredge chicken in plain flour, buttermilk, spiced flour, before frying in a good quantity of boiling lard.

  The paper was oil-spotted and worn; in another hand someone had written Crisco underneath the recipe, and another, mace!!! There were measurements at the bottom, too; 3 tbsp nutmeg 1 tbsp mace to 6 c flour, ¼ c salt, 3 tbsp pepper. But it was the original writing that transfixed Amanda. Nancy thought this was going to convince Mae that she hadn’t stolen the Mimi’s recipe, but it was more likely to do the opposite. How could they have this at Frannie’s? And what was she going to do now?

  Because what she was holding was Mimi’s original recipe, in her handwriting, the same as the one that hung in the Mimi’s kitchen, only scribbled on and worn and without the frame. The same, but different.

  Nancy took the recipe from her hands, turned it over, and handed it back to her. “It’s okay. I know. But there’s no way you could have been responsible for this. Read the back.”

  Before she could, Amanda heard running footsteps outside the kitchen. Gus burst through the swinging doors and stared at them, as though he hadn’t expected to find them there, then at the paper in Nancy’s hand. He spoke quickly, as if he was a little out of breath.

  “I was—I was just coming to find you, Grandma, to get the recipe. I guess—Mom told you?”

  Nancy nodded. He turned to Amanda. “We didn’t know what Mae said, Mom. Or I wou
ld have shown you yesterday.”

  Amanda looked from Gus to Nancy. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “I didn’t know the recipe was here,” Nancy said. “Gus did.”

  Gus smiled, a little sadly. “Grandpa showed it to me. Ages ago.”

  “But now—” Nancy tapped the paper in Amanda’s hands. “Read the back. Gus hasn’t seen that, either.”

  Amanda slowly turned over the page and read aloud.

  Frannie, I wish you much luck with Frannie’s. I do not think your man will be up to the job but I wish you much luck with him as well. Do not worry about the loan yet and do not tell him. This money and Frannie’s are yours. Like all men he will want to run things but he is easily fooled. I think that it is best I leave you to it for a while, as he and I will not agree.

  —Mimi

  And underneath it, in a different hand,

  Owe Mimi $1,400, October 29, 1889

  There wasn’t any more, but now Amanda knew for certain that the writing was Mimi’s. And she knew something else now, too. Something that changed everything, that was impossible, but was the only answer.

  “Mimi loaned Frannie money,” Amanda said slowly. “She wasn’t mad. And Frannie—she died, you know. Before Mimi.”

  “Mimi gave Frannie the recipe,” Nancy said. “And you can show that to Sabrina, and that’s it. You’re off the hook.”

  Amanda stood, turning the paper over in her hands. Nothing about this made sense. “But why would it change? Why did our chicken suddenly taste like Mimi’s when it didn’t before?”

  “Because I didn’t have it,” Nancy said. “When Frank—my Frank—died, there was a big mason jar of just the spices, all mixed. I didn’t know what was in it. I just guessed how much to throw in with the flour each time, and then when it was gone, I didn’t know how to make it. I kept trying—I did guess nutmeg at some point—but I never got it right. I kept playing with it, adding things. Cinnamon, even. Dill, which was awful. That’s why it changed all the time.”