Lolly grabbed her and hugged her. “I’m so, so sorry! They made me totally promise not to tell you. But I knew you’d be okay! You’re so strong. And you have so many ideas, Mae. You don’t need Sparkling.”
Mae willed herself to speak without her voice cracking, trying to focus on the anger she felt instead of the mess of sorrow and fear. “I’ll be fine,” she said, and as she spoke, an idea flashed into her mind. The best idea. The perfect idea. “I’ll be totally fine, you’re right. In fact, I didn’t say anything in there, and don’t tell anyone yet, but I just got an invitation to lead a Food Wars feature.”
Lolly looked surprised, and Mae rushed on. “It will just be a few episodes, but I’m pretty excited about it. I really can’t share any details. Anyway, we’ll keep in touch?”
“Of course,” Lolly said, and based on the look of interest in her eyes, Mae thought that she just might mean it, for once. “I can’t wait to hear about it.”
“I’ll text you updates. Remember, though, don’t tell anyone yet.” Lolly would, of course, and that was fine with Mae. She turned on one boot heel, hoping Lolly wouldn’t follow. The elevator seemed to take forever to come, but when it did, it was blissfully empty. Mae didn’t bother striking a Wonder Woman pose this time. She leaned into the corner, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and took her phone out of her bag. Apparently, she was going to Kansas.
* * *
×
By the time Jay got home from work, Mae was ready.
The apartment was spotless—sparkling, even. She’d booked tickets—taking two kids and a nanny to Kansas on a day’s notice wasn’t cheap, but she could write it off. She’d primed all her social media accounts with teasers. She was taking some time off from Sparkling. Exploring a new opportunity. She couldn’t say more—but stay tuned! Her audience would be stoked. Now she just had to persuade Jay to see it her way.
Jessa, at her request, had taken the kids to the park and then to their favorite local diner for dinner. Mae used the time packing and stewing, both literally—making a lamb and tomato stew that Jay loved—and figuratively. Every scene she’d recorded at Sparkling had flowed! She and Lolly were great together—anyone could see that. And didn’t the shopaholic Lolly need a foil? Or at least someone to bring her down to earth?
In her own home, Mae had established sleek white perfection. Clear surfaces. Just the right things on every shelf. Unstuffed drawers that opened easily. Cabinets that held only what fit—useful, well-cared-for things that did their jobs and then went back where they belonged without jostling or juggling or pushing other things aside. The afternoon’s cleaning binge had been unnecessary, really, but unless you kept on top of things, removing the excess and keeping just what you loved and what worked, everything piled up.
Just for the pleasure of it, she opened the drawer next to the stove, a deep drawer that moved quietly on slides she’d installed herself. There was the space for the Dutch oven, now in use on the stove. There was the spaghetti pot. There were the two saucepans. Those, plus the two frying pans that stood up in another cabinet, were both exactly what she needed and all she wanted.
Mae took a deep breath as she gazed down into the space, consciously dropping her shoulders from her ears. Who needed meditation when you had clean drawers? Ooh, that was brilliant. She grabbed her phone, took a quick picture of the drawer, then used an app to layer the words over the photo and share it to Instagram: Who needs meditation when you have clean drawers? #cleanspacecalmmind. That was a Mae Moore mantra. Once she left her mother’s house, she built her whole life around clean space, calm mind, and it worked.
But it was hard to stay calm when other people were so frustrating. Throughout that entire meeting, she’d wanted to shake Christine out of her ridiculous shoes. Mae had come home and composed an e-mail with all the things she hadn’t been able to say—a gracious acceptance that of course they’d audition others, a list of all the reasons she was perfect for this job, and a promise to change in all the ways they needed her to change—and then she’d added that her hiatus from Sparkling was perfectly timed, because she’d been asked to do a few episodes of Food Wars. Smoke that, Christine. She had other opportunities, so Sparkling better snap her back up.
No need to mention that Food Wars had nothing to do with her and everything to do with her mother’s chicken restaurant, which no one in New York even knew existed. Barbara would want as little camera time as possible, and that suited Mae, who was happy to be the face of Mimi’s revival. She’d be on set, sharing with her five hundred thousand current followers and capturing Food Wars followers, which would make her even more attractive to Sparkling and her book publisher. Amanda’s stupid idea was going to save her.
If the Food Wars episodes were popular enough, they could push Mae beyond Sparkling entirely. She could leap straight to a show of her own. One Food Wars restaurant had been given its own show—the one that made the crazy wedding cakes in Vegas. It could happen, and it was even more likely to happen to someone like Mae, who was already on the edge of viral. Gazing at the Food Wars website (and avoiding the headline story of the barbecue chef whose highly falsified culinary résumé had come to light during a recent taping), Mae had contemplated the crossover between home organization and food and come up with the perfect solution, and one that solved the dilemma of her next book as well. She could help people organize and simplify their kitchens, shopping lists, and family cooking habits. It was perfect: Less Is Moore in the Kitchen.
Mae was almost convinced that this was better than the Sparkling plan, except that Sparkling was a done deal, and this would require connecting a whole lot of dots. She had her foot in the door, though, and that was what mattered. She would make it happen, and once she had a television-size fan base, one that wanted her specifically, she’d be set.
She placed her laptop on the counter and started typing before she forgot any of her great ideas, but just as she’d started playing around with an actual pitch, she heard the clink of the gate outside their stoop. Quickly, she stowed her laptop away. This was not the day to be working when Jay came home.
The door swung open, and Jay burst in with his usual vigor, one arm behind his back. He hugged her with the other and produced, with a flourish, a bottle of champagne. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and then, as he caught sight of the look on her face—Champagne? She knew he hated her job at Sparkling, but champagne?—quickly went on. “Not to celebrate. But my mom always says bubbles aren’t just for when you’re already feeling bubbly.”
If Mae had hated Jay’s mom before, she really hated her now. That was exactly the kind of empty pronouncement she would make, probably just before ignoring her grandchildren and leaving on a yearlong cruise around the world. Mae shrugged, and Jay leaned down and hugged her again around the bottle, his tall form making her feel even smaller than usual. “You’ll come up with something great to do next. I know you will.”
He meant this nicely, he really did, and it was sweet, especially after all the arguments they’d had over Sparkling in the first place. She hugged him back. She needed him to be on board with her plans, and while she knew that wasn’t likely to be his first reaction, she also knew he could get there, if he just understood how perfectly this could all work out and what it could mean for her. That meant she needed to give him calm, collected Mae. Mae who knew what she was doing. Mae who took setbacks gracefully and was always moving upward.
“I already have an idea,” she said. “But sit. Eat. Come on, I made us dinner.”
Jay looked at the table set for two—nothing in front of the high chair and the booster seat. “Where are Madison and Ryder?”
“I sent them with Jessa to the diner, just for an hour.”
“Which means you have a plan.” He set down his workbag on the counter and started up the stairs as Mae picked up the bag to hang it in the hallway. “I’m changing first,” he said. “I can’t handle a plan i
n my work clothes.”
When he came back, now in yoga pants, black hair mussed from where he’d pulled on his favorite 76ers T-shirt, he sat down and looked at the table appreciatively while Mae handed him his plate. “This is service,” he said. “Very Mad Men.”
Mae took a champagne glass from the shelf and began to pour as she had learned from watching him, glass tilted, but not too carefully, because those who were used to champagne handled it with a certain insouciance. Inside, she was calculating. Champagne meant an extra hundred calories, which meant she wouldn’t eat the rice she had put on her plate to go with the stew, but she’d have to make it look like she did, because her avoidance of rice—and white bread, and pasta, and all of their many high-glycemic friends—annoyed Jay endlessly.
He took his glass, then held it out. “I know. We’re not toasting. This sucks. But, Mae, it’s also your chance. Our chance. You’re always talking about seizing opportunities, and we could grab this one. Take my mom up on her plan, go to India, meet her family. Take a break from New York.”
The fight. The same fight. How could he do this now? His plan, again—his ridiculous plan, born of, she had to admit, the worst deal he’d ever been staffed on, a merger between two monstrous restaurant chains based on the West Coast that had had him pulling constant all-nighters and taking the red-eye for months. His plan was for him to quit. I just need to take some time, he kept saying. I can’t even figure out what I want when it’s like this. A sabbatical, he kept calling it, but it wasn’t, not the way he wanted to do it, with no strings from the firm and thus no promise that they’d bring him back, even though he kept insisting they would. It was throwing himself into the abyss, and he wanted to take her with him.
This wasn’t fighting fair. He hadn’t even given her a chance to tell him what she wanted before he dumped this on her. She got it. He hated the hours. She’d hated the hours, too, back when they were both starting out in consulting, but unlike Jay, she was used to starting at the bottom of the ladder. Hell, where she came from there hadn’t even been a ladder. The consulting job they had once both had was a miracle for her, a major score, and she would have stuck it out, too, if they hadn’t agreed she should be the one to quit when Ryder arrived and everything got, not twice as hard, but seemingly exponentially so. It was one thing to have a nanny—they still had a nanny, especially now that Mae had built up her new business and written the book—but for both of them to stay free to work eighteen-hour days meant two nannies, really, and then why even have kids in the first place? But if one of them wasn’t going to stick with a steady paycheck and health insurance, they should never have—
But they had. Had kids, rented this place. They’d done it.
Now they were stuck. And Jay, Mae knew, truly felt stuck. If it weren’t for her, if it weren’t for the kids—had he ever even really had to do anything he didn’t want to before? Ever had to stick with anything? Looking at her happy-go-lucky husband across the table, Mae wanted, as she so often had in the past year, to throw her glass at him. Oh, sure, he’d gotten through business school, the same one his dad had gone to before him. Mae now knew there were two ways to get through B-school, and the first might be her way, by memorizing every business case and going to every study session and doing every extra thing and just generally grinding the hell out of it, and the second was through charm and talk and the willingness to throw every idea out there with abandon and see what your classmates could make stick. The latter involved what Mae’s friends called “the confidence of a mediocre white man,” and although Jay wasn’t white—his Indian heritage meant he didn’t tick that box—confidence he had in spades.
Which was what made him think he could just walk away from a good job and find another one waiting when he was ready.
Fine, if this was the fight they were going to have now, she would have it.
“Do you think that would really be a break for me, a zillion-hour flight and then staying in a house with people we’ve never met, with your mother and a three-year-old and a six-year-old?” The kids barely knew Jay’s mom. He barely knew his mom—his dad had raised him while his mom took Jay’s sister in a complicated divorce-not-divorce Mae still didn’t really understand, the kind of thing rich people apparently took for granted. Mae turned her own glass in her fingertips. She didn’t really want champagne. She wanted a cold Diet Coke, not that they kept anything like that in the house.
“I’ll be there too. And it’s not like I’m suggesting we go camping in the Sahara. There will be help.”
“Oh no, this isn’t the camping part. That comes after.” That was part two of Jay’s lunacy. After the trip to India, they backpacked around Europe. Or rented an RV and drove across the US. It varied, but it was like the man who loathed all social media had been spending all his time following #Airstreamlove and #havekidswilltravel. He’d be wanting a tiny house next.
“I can’t even process this right now, Jay. I mean, I just got basically fired. I know that fits in with your dreams”—she refrained, barely, from saying stupid dreams—“but it wasn’t in mine, okay?”
“We don’t have to camp. I just—look, Mae, I know you. I’m sorry this happened. But it did, and now you’re going to make choices because of it, and I want in on that.” He picked up his fork, then set it down. “Don’t you see? I’m just trying to buy us both some time.”
“I don’t want time,” she said, unable to keep her voice from sounding sharp. “The Sparkling thing is—a setback. But it’s just a small setback. I know you hate your job, Jay, but I don’t. I don’t want to tear everything up and start over.”
“But I do.”
His words hung between them for a moment—two children of single parents, two people who’d promised each other that whatever they did, they’d do it together, that their kids would never feel the way they had.
Jay looked down at his plate, took a bite, chewed. Mae bet he couldn’t taste it. She couldn’t even pretend to eat. “The lamb is good. I think the kids would like it, actually. I like the carrots.” Mae could tell he was trying to take the weight away from what he had just said. It wasn’t working. “Okay,” he said, “your turn. You said you had a plan. Spill.”
“I made enough to freeze,” Mae said, “They’ll get some.” Her plan sounded absurd now, after the argument they were having, but she couldn’t think of another way to present it. “The thing is,” she said, “my plan would make things so easy for you. I know this last deal was rough, and you’re about to get staffed on another one, so I’m taking the kids with me to visit my mother, and you’ll get to just—be here. Bachelor it. Whenever you’re not working, no us to worry about. I thought that would just take some of the pressure off, right? Give you room to hear yourself think.”
“I can’t hear myself think because I’m at work all the time,” Jay said. “You don’t want to go see my mom, but you’re running off to see yours? Wait—back up. You haven’t been to Kansas since Frank died. This isn’t about me. Why would you— Tell me why you’re going, Mae.” He shoved another bite of stew in his mouth, angrily, chewing and watching her. Waiting.
This was it. Time to go big or go home. Jay hated Sparkling and all that went with it, from the hundreds of thousands of followers it brought to Mae’s Instagram feed to the invitations that she and the kids do sponsored posts, the family photo shoots, the increased need for hours from Jessamyn, their nanny—hours that Mae’s income covered but that he objected to just the same. With Food Wars, Mae could keep all that going, and she would need to, since at this point every time he left the apartment, she wondered if he would still have a job when he came back. But Jay was not likely to be enthused.
She forced a note of excitement into her voice, as though she expected him to welcome her news. “Well, I might not be doing Sparkling for a while, but my sister called, and Food Wars is doing a series of shows about my mom’s restaurant, in Kansas. They need me to go home and help ou
t.”
Jay had picked up his glass while she spoke, sipping champagne, or pretending to. His eyebrows went straight up, and he let out a fast breath as he set down the glass, hard. His face was disbelieving, his tone flat. “They need you to go home and help with another reality show,” he said. He didn’t roll his eyes, but his look conveyed his disdain for the entire world Mae had become a part of.
“My mom really wants to do this,” she said. Damn it, he should be excited. It was a miracle that she could get back into TV, and so quickly, and he should respect her willingness to jump on it. He’d loved this part of her once. Loved her drive at the consulting firm, her ideas for her own business and the way she had launched it when Ryder turned one, growing it fast into a book deal and influencer status and practically a mini-empire.
Now all he ever wanted was for her to pull back and slow down. She pushed on, trying to reach the old Jay somewhere in all of this disapproval. “And for me, Jay, it comes at just the right time! Sparkling will see how valuable I am, and if they don’t, I can leverage this instead. You know how it is—it’s always easier to get a job when you’ve got a job.”
Jay glared at her, and she realized, too late, that her words probably sounded like yet another dig at his desire to take some time off “without boundaries.” She rushed on. “And my sister hasn’t done anything much since Frank died. She’s just stuck there, doing the same thing every day. This is a chance to help her finally get out of that rut.”
This time, Jay did roll his eyes. “Let me get this straight. You lost a TV show today, and your sister, who you haven’t visited in at least six years, has gained one. So you’re suddenly all revved to head home and be a part of it, and you’re trying to convince me you’re doing it for your sister and I should like it? That’s bullshit.” He pushed his plate away. “This is all bullshit, Mae. You’ve already said you’ll go, haven’t you? Already bought tickets. This isn’t you even asking me if you can take the kids off to be another sideshow somewhere. It’s you telling me. I bet you’re packed already, aren’t you? Tell me you’re not packed.”
The Chicken Sisters Page 4
