The Chicken Sisters

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  Mae took a deep breath, turned toward Amanda, and blurted it out. “Mom’s doctor told her she may have the symptoms of early Parkinson’s disease.” Part of Mae was still holding out for a talk with the doctor, despite an hour on Google last night, carefully limited to only the most optimistic-sounding sites, that had mostly convinced her the doctor was right.

  Amanda’s eyes locked on to Mae’s, and in that instant Mae got her sister back, but maybe not the sister she’d been holding in her head all these years, because while Mae saw a flash of fear in Amanda’s eyes, the next thing she saw was a steel that matched her own. If Mae hadn’t known it before, she knew it now—Amanda had plenty of the famous Moore fire in her. She’d just been hiding it for a long time.

  Amanda pulled her hand away. “Mom has—what? Mom is sick?”

  Mae nodded. “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she said. “In the house.” She remembered the frustration of that moment, and it crept unbidden into her next words. “But you wouldn’t listen.”

  Amanda got up and walked away, shoving her hands in the pockets of her jeans. “I wouldn’t listen because you were yelling at me, Mae. You weren’t telling me something. You were telling me off.”

  Mae knew Amanda’s reaction wasn’t about her, but about Barbara, but she couldn’t help herself. Amanda was still the reason she and Barbara had spent an entire day up to their elbows in cold chicken water, and the reason they were in there cleaning now. She’d been making fun of Mae ever since Mae came home, with her drinks and her enlightening Sabrina on how Mae put herself through college. She’d still broken all the rules about Mimi’s. Even if they turned out to be pointless rules. Even if Mae had always thought Barbara went too far with them. Even if Barbara herself was all messed up about what Mimi’s was supposed to be.

  “You’d just basically told Mom you hated her.” Mae stayed sitting, trying to stay calm, but she held on to the bench so hard that she could feel the grain of the wood pressing into her hands. “You made her cry, and I had to deal with her, and that’s always the way it is. You just go skipping off, and I’ve got Mom, and it can’t be that way. You can’t treat her like that.”

  “Seriously, Mae? You haven’t been here in six years. Six years. I’m the one that’s still here. I’m the one that’s coming over and cleaning out the fridge. I’m the one that sees Mom all the time.”

  “Maybe you think you are, but she’s not telling you things, and you’re not paying attention. It must have been pretty obvious something was up with Mom. She knew it. Aida knew it. So clearly you’re not here. You’re at Frannie’s.”

  “Yeah, because Frannie’s is normal. Everybody there is normal. In case you haven’t noticed, when I am here, Mom alternates between criticizing me and throwing me out.” Amanda crossed her arms over her chest, and Mae wanted to get up and shove her again. Wasn’t she listening?

  “Because she’s upset. Because you went to Frannie’s, and maybe it was the right thing for you, but it hurt her.” Mae grabbed the recipe off the table and stood up, waving it in her sister’s face. “This isn’t nothing, Amanda. It never was nothing. It messed up Mom’s whole life.” Mae knew she was being unreasonable. The recipe, the money—not Amanda’s fault, but so much of this was still on Amanda.

  Amanda put her hands on her hips. “You told the whole town—the whole world—that I stole Mimi’s recipe! What did you think I was going to do, smile and nod? I know it’s not nothing. Why do you think I’m here? I could have waited, or just shown Sabrina to prove we had a recipe, but I’m here, right? I’m trying to—do something. Fix this.”

  “You can’t fix this,” said Mae. “I told you they were going to try to pit us against each other and crawl right into our personal lives, and they did, and you made it easy for them. You’ve made this week hell for Mom. Stealing her chicken, and now the house, Patches—you’re the one that started this whole thing.”

  “You painted over my chicken!” Amanda put her hands up to her head and ran them through her short dark hair as if she couldn’t contain her need to move. “You and Kenneth! You were laughing at me, and you painted over my chicken. That’s what started this. Not me. You, having to win, coming here, taking over. You!”

  “I didn’t,” Mae said, her voice rising angrily and her own hands on her hips. Behind Amanda, the back door of Mimi’s swung open, but she didn’t have time to go slam it shut. They were having this out, now. She stood there, staring angrily at Amanda, every emotion of the last few days, of the last six years, washing over her, everything her sister had said and done and hadn’t said and hadn’t done—

  Thunk.

  The crashing sound of wood hitting wood rolled through Mimi’s and out onto the patio, and both Mae and Amanda froze. The first thunk was followed by a much louder one, a resounding smack, the sound of something very large falling, or swinging, or crashing, and the entire little building shook. Mae moved quickly toward the open door of Mimi’s, Amanda behind her, through the kitchen, the counter, seeing nothing, but that sound—it had come from here. She hesitated, looking at Amanda in confusion now. Was someone out there, listening? A car or a person?

  There was no one there. But the front door, like the back door, was open, and it was Amanda who walked out first this time, then stopped short, so that Mae careened right into her.

  “Oh—” Amanda gave a little gasp, and Mae echoed her, because what had made the sound was obvious now. The sign Kenneth had hung to cover Mae’s bad painting job had fallen, breaking the pot of flowers in front of it before coming to rest flat against the boards of the porch, now covered in potting soil and uprooted impatiens.

  Amanda knelt in front of the sign while Mae reached up to where it had hung, embarrassed again by her paint strokes—and now by the emotion that had driven them. She put a hand on the wall where Kenneth had twisted in an eye to hold the hooks on the sign. The screw of the eye had wrenched out, leaving an ugly splintered hole in the wood, and the one on the other side looked even worse.

  Amanda held up the eye itself, hook and short chain still attached to both eye and sign. “I guess.” She paused, raising her eyebrows at her sister. “I guess it just got too heavy.”

  Mae looked at the four inches of screw in her sister’s hand, and at the sign—a weight, sure, but nothing she couldn’t pick up herself if she had to—and raised her own eyebrows. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Too much for the old place to bear.”

  All the fight had gone out of her with her panicked reaction to the noise, and from Amanda, too, it looked like. Mae sat down on the edge of the porch, and Amanda left the sign, stepping down into the freshly mown grass of the tiny yard between the porch and sidewalk and sitting next to her.

  “Or . . .” Amanda shrugged, and leaned gently into Mae’s shoulder again.

  “Or,” agreed Mae. She reached out again and took her sister’s hand. “I’m sorry,” Mae said, at exactly the same moment that Amanda said it too. They both laughed, but Mae was the one who kept going. She didn’t want to be fighting with Amanda. Not anymore. It was just so easy to go down that road with her sister. One of them said something, and the other said something, and then neither of them wanted to back down. Like a big game of chicken. Mae laughed, and Amanda looked at her, but she couldn’t explain. “Kenneth was mad at me, actually,” she said. “He saved me with his sign, but he was pretty pissed. I’m really sorry.”

  Amanda sighed and leaned against her harder. “Say that again,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I ruined your sign.” She was. But she couldn’t let Amanda off too easy. “And you better be sorry too, because what you pulled next caused us a world of hurt. We had to use frozen chicken, did you know? We had to spend the whole day water-defrosting them. My hands are still chapped.” Mae held them out for her sister to see, then realized they didn’t look very bad and put them down. “They still feel chapped, anyway.”

  “Yeah.�
� Amanda looked intently at her feet, as if she was considering her old Birkenstocks carefully, but Mae knew better. “I do feel bad about that,” Amanda said. “I really do.”

  “I’m sorry I told them about the biscuits,” Mae said. She was kind of sorry, anyway. That one still made Mae want to laugh.

  “Why’d you come anyway, Mae? I told you, you didn’t have to.”

  Mae shrugged. Did she really want to answer that? It was almost embarrassing, how big her plans had been, and how dumb, really. Amanda sat, waiting. “I came home because I thought I really wanted my own TV show,” Mae finally said. “I figured I’d do this, and the Food Channel would see how great I was. I thought I wanted what Sabrina has, and you know what? She doesn’t have anything.”

  “She doesn’t have shit,” Amanda agreed, picking a single long blade of grass that had escaped the mower and putting it between her lips. “Not anything anybody real would want, anyway.” She tried to blow a whistle along the grass and failed dismally.

  Mae picked up another blade of grass and blew a perfect tweet, then grinned, knowing she was being annoying. Just annoying enough, maybe. “Why is it so hard for us to figure out what we actually want?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but Amanda stopped to consider. She gazed up at the roof of the porch above them, tilting her head back to look at the wall with the ghost of her sign still visible behind them. “Maybe because we never saw anybody want anything that worked out? Maybe because everything we ever wanted turned to trash the minute it came into the house?” Amanda tried to laugh, but Mae could see she meant what she was saying. “Maybe because everything we want dies or basically goes up in smoke? Or no, that’s just me. And what do you mean, anyway? You always get what you want, Mae. Always.”

  Mae looked to see if Amanda was starting up their fight again, but no. She was just—saying something she thought was true. Something Mae had thought was true, too, up until just now.

  “I get what I go after,” she said slowly. “But that doesn’t mean I go after what I want. I go after—the opposite of Mom. Just like you, I guess. Frannie’s, Nancy, Frank’s whole family—they were not this. For me, it was school, New York, organizing, being famous for being neat and clean”—oh God, it really was funny—“the opposite of our whole life, right? And in the end we’re both still just being pushed around by Mom’s mess.”

  Amanda sighed. “What are we going to do? About Mom, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. I know it’s big, but I don’t want it to be big. I think—it’s going to take both of us to deal with it.” And that was exactly what she wasn’t ready to talk about right now. She rushed on. “But first, we really have to figure out about Frannie’s—the recipe!” Mae got up and scurried back through Mimi’s, returning with the recipe in her hand. “Not something we want to lose.”

  “Yeah,” said Amanda. “I kind of wanted to, though. At first. Just for a minute. I hate that Frank must have known.”

  Mae did, too. But Frank was gone, and there was no point in worrying about that. “He just did what his parents did, you know? It’s one or the other. You go along with them, or you run like hell.”

  “What his dad did,” Amanda said firmly. “Nancy didn’t know. And she’s trying to help now. With Mom’s house.”

  All of the other ways in which their mom was going to need help soon sat heavy between them. Mae hoped her sister was right about Nancy. She’d like to have a Nancy to lean on.

  “I guess I’m going to come home,” she said, and Amanda sat up straight and turned to her.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” Mae said. She understood why Amanda looked surprised, but wasn’t that exactly what they had just been talking about? “For a while, anyway. I can still write a new book if I can sell one. I can help Mom, but it will be good for me, too. I feel like, if everybody knows you, you can’t be all, Well, I don’t have any idea what I want to do with my life but at least my silverware drawer is perfect.”

  “Sure you can,” said Amanda. “You just described half the parents of kids in Frankie’s class.”

  Damn it, Amanda wasn’t supposed to argue with her—wasn’t this Mae telling Amanda that maybe she was right all along? “But you stayed. You’re part of the town. You get to know everybody who makes your coffee and your kids got to be little here where everyone knows who they are, and you don’t have to be always working so hard to make things happen. You can just live.”

  “That’s the problem,” Amanda said. “That’s why I wrote Food Wars in the first place—nothing ever does happen. You just get up and do things, and every day is the same until it isn’t, and then you’re old and your kids are gone and you’re still the hostess in a chicken restaurant. It’s exactly what you always used to say. Which you should still be sorry for, as long as we’re apologizing, because you were really mean about Frank, and about Gus. But even though I loved Frank—” Amanda paused and gulped, and Mae eyed her apprehensively, but she wasn’t crying, even if she looked like she might be about to. Instead, she looked out at Main Street, ran her tongue over her lips, and went on. “Even though I loved him and I wanted Gus and Frankie, so much, it didn’t exactly end up being what I thought it would be. And now there’s nothing to do and nothing to hope for, and Food Wars turned out to be more of the same crap. Worse, even.”

  Mae turned Mimi’s recipe, and her note for her sister, over in her hands, gently. Amanda was right. She had been mean, or at least, too blunt. A steamroller, Jay had said. But Amanda had been so young—and she had been right—

  And also wrong. Especially because somehow she had thought it should be so easy for her sister to do very hard things. She’d been young too, and maybe she had thought that if Amanda did what she did, came away to college, moved heaven and earth, and, yeah, hips and boobs, to pay for it, bought into the new life Mae was creating, then it would be even more solid. When it had never been solid in the first place, whereas the life Amanda had made with Frank, especially Gus and Frankie but not just them, the whole thing, was a rock, even if it seemed like it was Amanda who was having trouble seeing it now.

  “I am sorry about that,” Mae said softly, and felt rather than saw Amanda’s blue eyes trained on her. “I am. I wanted you with me, not with Frank, but you did okay. You guys were great. Your kids are great. Watching them, today, with Mom—you have them, you have Nancy, and even when Frank died, you had this amazing place and community around you. And you still do.”

  Amanda stretched her legs out, then stood up suddenly. Mae knew she was trying not to cry, but her next words were still a surprise. “It didn’t really turn out to be enough.”

  AMANDA

  Enough heart-to-heart. Amanda reached out and slid Mimi’s recipe from Mae’s hands, changing the subject abruptly, as you can with someone who knows when you’ve had all you can take.

  “What are we going to do about this money thing? Because Nancy wants to make it right, and I don’t know what that means, and Mom— I’m afraid Mom will take Nancy’s money.” She looked at Mae to make sure her sister didn’t just think that was a fine idea, but Mae was still listening to her. “Nancy doesn’t have any money. I know it looks like she does, or at least has more than Mom, but unless we win—”

  “You’re not winning,” Mae said almost automatically.

  Then she stuck out her tongue, and Amanda had to laugh. “Yes, we are,” she said. “We’re going to expand and make Frannie’s the best fried chicken place in the state. Or that was the plan.” Should she even say this, this next part? Might as well. She’d already said so much. “But I’m not even sure we want to anymore.”

  “You did all that stuff to win—and you don’t want to win?” Mae was staring at her now, her face serious again.

  “I still want to win. For Nancy. And Frannie’s. We’re still going to win. I just—I think I’m done with chicken. You said it a long time ago, and you were wrong the
n, but you’re right now. I need to get out there and try to figure out who I am without”—she gestured around her—“any of this. Not that I know what I do want to do. And Nancy—I’m not even sure she wants it either. But we’re still winning.” She smiled faintly as she stood up, stretching her legs, and Mae followed. “Maybe we just want to beat the pants off you.”

  “No, you’re not.” Mae paused for a minute, and a look came across her face that Amanda recognized. Mae, thinking. Mae, about to start something. Without even realizing she was doing it, Amanda took a step back, and Mae put a hand out and grabbed her sister’s arm. “What do you mean, Nancy might not want to win either?”

  She had said way too much. “Oh, she wants to win. Hell yeah.” Whatever Mae had in her head, it better not be that Frannie’s was going to throw this thing. “It’s just that she said something weird. When I told her I might be ready to—try something new.” Amanda paused as Nancy’s words came back to her, and she repeated them. “‘What makes you think I’d want to run Frannie’s without you?’”

  “Huh,” said Mae. “That is—weird.”

  “And not like she wanted me to feel guilty, either. She’s not Mom. It was more like, just real. And now I don’t know.” Mae was looking thoughtful—and just a little too happy. “Which doesn’t mean we’re not winning, if that’s what you’re thinking, because I can tell you’re thinking something.”

  “It’s just—if she doesn’t want to—what if—” Mae stopped, tapping her foot thoughtfully on the wooden boards of the porch and her fingers on one hip. Amanda waited for what seemed like forever until Mae finally looked up, eyes bright. “If she feels that way, maybe we can do something big. This is our chance. Everybody will be excited that Mimi and Frannie didn’t hate each other. We’ll all be trying to figure out what to do about that loan. And the thing is, we’re all equal now. Anybody could win this. I think Mimi’s will, you think Frannie’s will, but we can all see that there are good things in both places, right?” She grabbed Amanda’s arms, almost dancing with excitement.