Mae glanced toward the hall closet, where she’d tucked the suitcases, and felt her face get hot. “I did make plans, because we really have to go. This is a big chance for my mom and my sister—apparently business isn’t too great—and it’s a chance for me, and so what? I’m paying for it. I bought the tickets. I’m paying for Jessa to come with us. You don’t even have to worry about it. You just get some kid-free time to do your own thing.”
“You’re going to Kansas. And you’re taking the kids. To be on a reality show. And you didn’t even wait to ask me?” Jay’s voice was getting louder. “What if I’d worked late tonight? Would I just wake up in the morning and find a little note?” He shoved his chair away from the table and got up. “I hate this. I hate you not telling me things. I hate that now you’re going to take the kids, and there will be posed airport pictures, and cute little traveling memes or whatever, and then you’ll send them off with Jessa in some strange town while you try to get more fucking famous. You’ve got plenty of followers. When is it ever going to be enough?”
“I’m not just trying to get famous. This is how I sell more books, and get more work, and get paid, so I can pay the rent and the nanny and the private school tuition. This is the deal.”
“You don’t pay the rent and the nanny all by yourself, Mae. We pay the rent and the nanny. For our kids. And we have savings. Which I thought we could use, while we both take some time off to figure out where we’re going, because we are lost.”
“We’re not lost. We have a great life here. You just don’t see it.”
“I don’t see it because I’m never home to enjoy it.”
“You will be. We just both have to push a little harder right now, and then things will get easier. That’s the way it works. You work hard and you pay your dues and it pays off.”
“Or you work hard and then you die. Maybe that’s, like, the Kansas pioneer spirit. Maybe that’s you. But some of us want time to make sure we really want what we’re working for.”
“And some of us know you don’t always get another chance to go get it.”
They stared at each other, the familiar stalemate reached, and Jay was the one who broke, looking away. That was it, and Mae knew it. She’d won. This time.
Actually she won every time.
Jay got up and walked to the trash to scrape off his plate, but when the trash can popped open, he stopped and reached in. Mae got cold inside. Shit. That was where she had put everything from her satisfying clear-out earlier in the day, and she hadn’t covered up the things she was discarding with other trash, as she usually did. Damn it! She knew exactly what was coming. Jay stood up with a ratty stuffed chicken in his hand.
“You can’t throw this away. Ryder loves this.”
He did, but Mae hated it. The little stuffed chicken—a gift from her sister when Ryder was born—had grown gray and smelly and was beyond washing, and Mae had been able to slip it away from Ryder’s bed for several nights running. With the trip, she figured he would forget about it, although she’d felt a tiny twinge of regret as she’d stuffed it into the trash can. It was just that it was so gross now, and there were so many stuffies. If she didn’t get rid of them, they’d take over.
“He doesn’t care about it. Not really,” she said. It sounded weak, even to her. “It’s so filthy, Jay. He’s little. He’ll like other things. It’s just junk, anyway.”
Jay turned on her. “You don’t always get to decide what’s junk, Mae. You don’t get to pick and choose everything we have and everything we do and everywhere we go.”
“I don’t. Just—some things. And it’s not the same.”
Throwing away a toy was not the same as making all their life decisions—and how could she not make decisions right now, when everything Jay wanted to do felt so precarious? Couldn’t he see that they wanted the same things, for the world to stay nice and safe and solid around Madison and Ryder and around themselves? She knew Jay had moved around a lot as a kid, and that at least once his dad had handed him a shoebox and told him that if it didn’t fit in there, it couldn’t come. But sometimes you had to get rid of things, even things you once loved, to make room for better things.
And sometimes you made mistakes. Don’t bring up the baseball glove. Don’t bring up the baseball glove.
She hadn’t known the baseball glove was a perfectly worn-in classic Rawlings. Or that Jay had been hoping Madison or Ryder might use it someday. All she’d seen was that it was old. And kinda moldy. She honestly hadn’t thought he would notice it was gone.
Sometimes you needed to make hard choices, and then just keep going. Apparently Mae was the only one here who knew how to do that.
She got up and started to clear the table. He could have the stuffed chicken if he wanted it. Let the battles continue. Was this how marriage worked? They just kept replaying this same scene? Wasn’t there supposed to be some point where they got past it, where they did the right thing and moved on?
Maybe neither of them knew how.
“I’m going out to meet Jessa and get the kids,” Jay said, and Mae shrugged, not looking at him as he left the kitchen.
Jay would get over it once she really had things sorted out. He’d get past this early midlife crisis he was having and just work all of his yoga and meditation and stuff into his job like a normal person. Maybe they’d even laugh about it, like they used to laugh at stuff like that.
And if not—Mae took a deep breath and turned on the water in the sink—she’d be ready for it. She was always ready.
The next morning, when she bent to buckle Ryder into the taxi to go to the airport, he was clutching the chicken tightly to his chest, looking so much like his father that it made Mae catch her breath with a combination of fear and love. “Daddy told me to take special care of my chicken,” he said. “We gave it a new name, not just Chicken.” He paused, then pronounced the name carefully. “Raw-lings. We called it Rawlings.”
Damn.
AMANDA
On Wednesday afternoon, precisely at two, Sabrina Skelly and Food Wars showed up in Merinac, and Mae did not.
The minute the convertible came into view, van trundling along behind it, Amanda silenced her phone and shoved it deep into the recesses of her tote bag. Mae’s absence was not her problem, and Andy’s texts—at first conspiratorial, and now getting a little frantic as he apparently dealt with a Barbara who believed he could just postpone this whole thing—were a distraction she didn’t need. This was the way she wanted it, anyway. Mae’s sudden enthusiasm for Food Wars had been welcome and helpful; her insistence that she actually was coming to Merinac had not been. The less Mae, the better.
Amanda was ready. Frannie’s was ready. Nancy was ready, or Amanda hoped she was. She was paler than Amanda had ever seen her and gripping Amanda’s hand with sweaty force. It seemed entirely possible that her mother-in-law might faint, or burst, and that, at least, Amanda understood completely.
Worrying about Nancy was an excellent way to avoid worrying about herself. Amanda always drew chickens when she was upset—those stupid chickens, Mae called them, and Amanda’s art teacher, along with every other teacher, agreed—and this year her sketchbook was full of them. She’d stayed up late last night, unable to stop, and the chickens that emerged from her pencil had fared poorly in front of the camera, tripping and rolling across the floor, molting all their feathers, unexpectedly laying an egg.
Amanda did not like cameras. In school pictures, she was the awkward tall girl hulking in the back and staring at the ground. She was not Mae, who starred in every school production. Amanda painted sets. She did not appear onstage. She’d thought, when she wrote that first e-mail to Food Wars, that maybe she could overcome that. She could be someone different. After all, she’d gained two children and a mother-in-law and lost a husband since those days—but she knew if Mae showed up, the old Amanda would reemerge.
But Mae was
n’t here. The new Amanda, the one who made things happen in Merinac—made it a place Mae claimed to want to come home to, even—prepared a welcoming smile as Sabrina Skelly opened her car door and headed straight for her, arms outstretched, tiny self nearly running in spite of ridiculously high heels, her brown curls catching the sunlight.
“You must be Amanda! Oh, this is such a delight. We’re just so glad to be here, and this”—she looked around, gesturing to the low buildings that made up Frannie’s, the big sign, with its fifties-era lit-up outline of a chicken and an arrow pointing in, and the fields stretched out around it—“this is perfect. Just perfect.”
Sabrina was right—it was perfect. This little northeastern corner of Kansas really gleamed in the spring, with a fresh light that everyone who lived here treasured before the heat of the summer kicked in, and a few rolling hills that took everyone expecting flat open spaces by surprise. Sabrina embraced Amanda, who returned it as best as she could, given that Nancy had not let go of her hand. “Amanda, really, it’s just lovely to meet you finally.”
Amanda, a little dumbstruck and very aware of her own lack of makeup and the unstyled waves of dull brown hair, which she cut herself at a boring and blunt shoulder length, settled for a straightforward response. “It’s nice to meet you, too. This is my mother-in-law, Nancy, who runs Frannie’s.”
Nancy, too formally dressed in a silky blouse with a light sweater over it, both in Frannie’s maroon, hovered next to her. “I run it with Amanda,” she said. “I couldn’t do it without her.” Behind Nancy pressed every member of Frannie’s staff, all eager to be introduced and recognized, to have the sun of stardom shine on them for a moment. Sabrina waved over her crew, and there was a wild flurry of introductions and explanations before Sabrina clapped her hands. Clearly she wasn’t just the star and nominal producer of Food Wars—this woman ran the show.
“My people! Get on with your jobs; get us settled. Frannie’s people—let’s get this party started! We brought cookies from McLain’s in Kansas City, and let me tell you, they’re divine.” She ushered them inside and started pushing tables together, disrupting the existing precision arrangement, but after a moment even Nancy was dragging over a chair.
All around them, young men and women moved competently around, setting cameras in corners, opening curtains, carrying clipboards, and getting signatures. Amanda signed a release, as well as one for Gus and Frankie, leaning on the bar while watching someone set up a stepladder and begin wiring a camera onto a beam high above the dining room. Feeling as though Nancy’s nerves were igniting hers, Amanda slid quietly around the table and into a seat opposite her just as Gus and Frankie came in. She reached out a hopeful hand to her daughter, inviting her to share the seat, but the gesture was met with a look of fourteen-year-old scorn as Frankie carefully took a chair next to her grandmother. Fine. Amanda found Nancy a far more comforting presence than her own mother as well, although she had tried so hard not to end up there with Frankie. It was just that lately, Frankie only wanted to talk when Amanda had nothing more to give, and when Amanda reached out, which was often, Frankie suddenly wasn’t there as she had always been.
Gus, though, sat next to his mother and smiled, looking nearly at ease as he pulled over the bakery box. “Oh man,” he said softly. “Cup cookies from McLain’s. Okay, these people know food.” Amanda nudged him. Shhh.
Sabrina stood, gathering their attention even more intensely. “So, as I’m sure you know, I’m Sabrina Skelly, your gracious host, and also the producer of the show out here on the front lines. Everybody else gets the cushy jobs back at the office, but I get all the glory, so, you know, trade-offs.” She smiled at them all widely, and of course they smiled back. They loved her. “You’ll meet all the rest of the staff as we roll, but for now, let me set the scene for you and answer any questions. You probably all know the basic schedule. That is, if you’ve watched any Food Wars.” Here she paused, as if she expected exactly the collective burst of laughter she got. Who hadn’t watched Food Wars?
“Only every episode,” called Mary Laura, who had rigged up a way to watch downloads on the TV that played constantly above her bar. Amanda wished, not for the first time, that she had Mary Laura’s cool.
Sabrina smiled and went on. “Let me lay it out for you anyway. We’ve got people with cameras, and cameras that will stay in place. Those cameras will be running the whole time we’re here, so don’t think that if there’s nobody with a camera following you, you’re not on. We’re pretty much able to take you live anytime, and we’ll be putting little snippets up on social media, teasing the audience for the shows later.” She said it all quickly, casually, as though it were the most normal thing in the world.
“Tonight we’ll just film around the restaurant, informal, some background stuff. Tomorrow, Thursday, we’ll do more of that but in a more organized way, capture whole meals, maybe follow one or two of you around for the night. You might do lunches, but we don’t—we’re strictly a dinnertime thing, gives the crew some time off. Then Friday we’ll bring in our chef-judges for a visit and a meal, and first thing Saturday we’ll do an official judging of just the chicken—a chicken-off. Then a little more filming Saturday night if we need it, then we announce the winners Sunday morning, and you can all go back to your lives.”
Tomorrow? Friday? Amanda thought this was just a get-to-know-you visit, but apparently their appearance on Food Wars was a done deal. Sabrina must have noticed the surprise that rustled around the table.
“We’re already here,” she said, leaning in with a conspiratorial smile. “We’re filming, and we start by assuming that we’re going all the way with this. If things don’t go well, we pull the plug, but it’s rare that we can’t make something happen. We can do this, people.” She leaned back and beamed, her confidence lighting all their faces. “For right now, just get ready for a regular shift, and then a wild ride of a week.”
There was laughter and some nudging of elbows. They wanted, every last one of them, to make this happen. The more talk there had been before the Food Wars crew arrived, the more Amanda had realized that the show touched a nerve in nearly everyone. If she saw herself, and Nancy, as doyennes of a televised chicken empire, their friends and staff saw themselves among the merry band of colleagues who would surround them, the scene-stealing sidekicks, the wry, knowledgeable besties. Food Wars would make them all real, and it all started now.
“I thought you’d want to split us all up and get us to talk about each other behind our backs,” Mary Laura said.
“That comes later,” a cameraman said with mock seriousness, helping himself to a cookie. Sabrina, who was somehow managing to fit right in, laughed along with him.
“It does look like that,” she said, “but really we like to get everybody together at the beginning, just talking. I mean, of course we have a little fun with in-house rivalries, but it’s the big competition we really focus on. We’ll do the talk-to-the-camera stuff, but most of the time there are lots of people around, listening. So it’s not like we’re trying to corner anyone, or trick them. It comes out looking all secret, but it’s really all open and friendly.”
“Yep,” said the cameraman, whom Sabrina introduced as Gordo, with his mouth full. “So, who here hates each other? Raise your hands.” The staff giggled.
“We have a very friendly working relationship here,” Nancy said stiffly. Her cookie sat untouched in front of her. “Everyone works together; everyone does everything that needs to be done.”
“That’s just what Amanda said in her e-mails,” said Sabrina, and Amanda looked at her in surprise. Had she said that?
Sabrina went on. “That you guys were really a big family. Amanda’s your daughter-in-law, right? Any other family members work here?”
“My grandson, Gus, washes dishes,” Nancy said, smiling at Gus and putting an arm around Frankie. It was an unusually warm day for May, and Amanda could see a little swea
t around Nancy’s hairline and under her nose. “He’s Franklin Augustus, actually. His sister, Frances—Frankie—is champing at the bit to join the family business, but Amanda thinks she’s too young.”
Actually, Frankie had repeatedly said, “Gross,” to Amanda’s suggestions that she join her brother for a shift or two, but that wasn’t how Amanda had described it to Nancy, and it certainly wasn’t how Frankie was playing it now.
“I’m going to bus tables this weekend,” she said.
“That’s perfect,” Sabrina said. “But you two, Nancy, Amanda, how long have you been working together?”
“Oh,” Nancy said, “ever since Amanda married my son, Frank.”
Amanda noticed that the cameraman lifted his camera onto his shoulder and slid unobtrusively to a position in front of a window. It’s started, she thought, and her stomach flipped over. This was exciting. It was supposed to be exciting. All the same, she wanted to warn Nancy and Frankie: they’re recording! But she couldn’t think of a way to do it without being obvious, so she settled for nudging Gus and nodding in the camera’s direction.
Annoyingly, Gus patted her hand. “It will be okay, Mom,” he whispered. “That’s why they’re here.”
Nancy was still talking. “More than seventeen years ago now. Hard to believe.”
“I can tell you get along beautifully,” Sabrina said. “That’s just amazing. Most mothers- and daughters-in-law we see working together, it can get a little tense.”
“Oh no,” Nancy said. “We don’t have that problem.” Now Amanda wished she had sat with Nancy, just so she could give her a hug. They didn’t have that problem, as hard as it might be for outsiders to believe. Things between them just worked.
The Chicken Sisters Page 5
