“And your husband and your son—they’re both gone now?”
“For six years,” replied Nancy. “They were killed in the same car accident, on the way to a Chiefs game. Amanda and I—we’ve always been close, and if anything, that brought us closer.”
Amanda, needing to touch some member of her family, leaned on her son gently, and Gus put an arm around her. Okay, she was lucky. Nancy was being great—was great. And Sabrina was nice. This was going to be fine.
Sabrina turned to Amanda and smiled warmly. “But your mother runs Chicken Mimi’s, right?” Somehow, the way she asked it, it didn’t feel like a challenge, more like they were just laying the facts out. Of course people would have to know that.
Amanda took a breath, trying to find a way to explain. “She does,” she said. “And I used to work there, too. And then—I married Frank.”
Couldn’t that be enough? Of course not. Sabrina was looking at her, waiting for more. “We fell in love. In high school. And then—” Oh, this was awkward. She fell silent, and Mary Laura leapt in instead.
“Of course we all knew Frank had a big crush on Amanda,” she said. “It was like Romeo and Juliet, only with fried chicken.” That got her a laugh and took the pressure off Amanda too, but Mary Laura never knew when to stop. “It was a little weird,” she added cheerfully. “We thought they must be related, kinda, but I guess those relatives lived a really long time ago.”
“Frank and Amanda were perfect together,” Nancy said, giving her staffer a slight glare. “I was delighted when they began dating. Amanda was—is—a lovely girl.”
Oh God. Amanda stared down at her cookie, willing them not to go any farther down this road. Nancy might have been delighted, or at least willing to pretend to be, but her mother and Mae had not been. Mae had been trying to drag Amanda down her own path, off to college, working her way through by doing every dirty but well-paid job imaginable, from cleaning crime scenes to exotic dancing. Mae had only laughed when Amanda started dating Frank (she’d pronounced it the “lamest rebellion ever”), but once they decided to get married, Mae’s tolerance had been replaced by horror that Amanda planned to throw her life away on fried chicken and Frank, and she had said so, loudly and often, while offering to pay for the abortion she knew perfectly well Amanda never intended to have and demanding to know how the sister she’d seen to it was thoroughly educated in every aspect of birth control could possibly have gotten herself into this mess.
Her mother’s reaction had been quieter but worse. She’d said hardly anything about the wedding, hardly anything about Frank, even, but then, she never said much. Everything that mattered in the Moore household went unspoken, and this turned out to be just another case where no one had told Amanda the rules Mae seemed to have been born knowing. Driving home after a short honeymoon in St. Louis, Amanda needed to pee desperately. In those days, there was no inn on Main Street, no coffee shop, no craft store. She told Frank to pull in at Mimi’s.
“You sure?”
Amanda didn’t even see why he was asking. Why would they not?
Barbara came out as the car stopped, and Amanda tried to rush around her. Peeing was far more urgent than a hug. But Barbara stepped in front of her and gently barred the way. “No.”
“What do you mean, no?” Amanda could still remember her younger self’s confusion.
“I mean no. You belong to Frannie’s now, Amanda. You’re a Pogociello. That means you stay out here on the porch.”
Amanda had been shocked enough to stop in her tracks. “You can’t mean that.”
“It’s not me, Amanda. You know the way this works. You’ve always known. Did you really think you could have both?” She must have been able to tell from Amanda’s expression that that was exactly what Amanda had thought. “If you’re part of Frannie’s, you can’t come into Mimi’s.” She steered her daughter away from the door, but Amanda tried again to push past her. “Mom! I just have to go to the bathroom. Come on, this is ridiculous.”
Barbara didn’t move, and after a stunned moment, Amanda turned away. Barbara stood in the doorway, watching, while Amanda got back into Frank’s car.
“We could run into the hardware store, probably,” Frank muttered.
Amanda sat down heavily in the seat, her legs still out the door, staring back at Mimi’s. “She wouldn’t let me in,” she said.
“Well, no,” he said. “Of course she wouldn’t.” He looked at her, and she realized that she had disappointed him somehow. He stared down at the steering wheel. “You thought she would?”
Without another word, Frank drove them to his parents’ house, where Amanda rushed to the bathroom, and he sat in the car for a while before he came inside. She knew now, although she had not been able to see it then, that realizing she didn’t understand the consequences of their marriage made Frank doubt her from the very beginning. She had taken the story he’d been imagining, of her giving up everything for him, and turned it into a tale of supreme youthful cluelessness.
She had never told him so, but she would have married him anyway. At nineteen, she’d craved everything he offered: love, security, faith, a predictable future. But who the hell knew what they really wanted at nineteen? At least she had dumb-lucked herself into something pretty good, she thought, looking around at the cozy crowd of friends and family, at Nancy, calmer now and beaming at her across the table. Her sister and her mother were her history. This was her present.
“Romeo and Juliet,” said Sabrina, smiling at her. “It sounds like a wonderful romance. And now you’re part of this.” She gestured around her, and Amanda nodded.
“This is my family now,” she said, thinking of Frank but speaking to Nancy, “and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
There was a small collective “awww,” and everyone smiled at an embarrassed Amanda until Sabrina broke things up with a shift in her tone and body language that made it clear that she had been playing to the camera before.
“We do want to set up somewhere for those offstage interviews,” she said. “Amanda, is there an office or something? It’s better for the sound if it’s in a small room, if there is one. We can even clean out a closet.”
* * *
×
“Perfect,” Sabrina said as she looked around the tiny windowless office Amanda shared with Nancy. She hopped up on the desk Amanda used for payroll and the occasional late-night drawing session and sat, her perfect legs dangling. “Amanda, honey, grab that chair and take a seat.” She turned to the cameraman. “Gordo, want to get set up? Use Amanda for target practice, see how the lighting is, et cetera?”
Amanda pulled the old armchair out of the corner into the spot Gordo indicated and settled into it while he fussed about her, first setting up his tripod and a camera, then pulling lights from a big bag and moving them around, then going back to peer at his screen. She tried to relax. He was just setting up, after all. There was nothing to worry about. She leaned back and crossed her legs, watching him move around the room, and tried to think of something to say that didn’t sound totally dorky.
She failed. “I can’t believe you picked us.” She couldn’t, either. Couldn’t believe that she was here, in their office, hanging out with Sabrina Skelly. “You must get so many e-mails. We’re so excited—I mean, it’s just so cool that you’re here.”
“You’d probably be surprised how few we get,” Sabrina said. “Most people don’t have the balls to actually go after what they want. They talk about it, and they think about it, but they don’t often make it happen.”
Amanda touched her hair, pleased. It was pretty rare for anyone to tell her she had balls, even indirectly.
“So that’s really your son out there? You must have been a baby when you had him. You can’t be more than thirty now.” Sabrina’s tone was casual, even if the question felt a little sudden. Gordo was still fussing around with lights and cords, paying the
m little attention. She must just be used to asking personal questions—and most people asked this eventually. Might as well get it out of the way.
“I’m thirty-five, actually.” Thirty-five with a baby face, although at least they’d finally stopped carding her at liquor stores a few years ago. “I was nineteen when Gus was born.”
Sabrina looked thoughtfully at her. “Oops?”
Amanda laughed. “Not really.” She hated it when people assumed that. No, she hadn’t exactly planned to get pregnant, but she hadn’t had better plans, either, and Frank had loved the idea of starting a family young. That was another thing Mae had never understood—that not everybody needed to control everything. Sometimes you rolled with what came. But she didn’t want Sabrina to think she was some sort of hayseed, or even that she had been at eighteen. “Start young, and you end up like me—two great kids who can mostly take care of themselves, and you’re not too old to enjoy it.”
“Exactly! You can do anything now, right? What’s the plan? More Frannie’s? Your mother-in-law seems great.”
“Oh, she really is,” Amanda said, and then stopped. More Frannie’s was the plan, as far as she’d made one. But that sounded so—in Mae’s old word—lame. She couldn’t really tell the glamorous Sabrina that she just wanted things back the way they had always been. She was happy to talk about Nancy, though. “She loves us—all of us, I mean, everybody who works here. She always wanted a big family, but she just had Frank, so we’re all kind of her family.”
Amanda remembered Nancy’s joy when Frankie was on the way, her hope that Amanda and Frank would go on to have many more; she’d confided that Frank being an only child was not at all what she’d planned. But this was a little too close to Nancy’s heart, here. “What about you, do you have kids?” Thanks to Wikipedia, she knew the answer, but it seemed weird to admit it.
“God no. This is scarcely the lifestyle for it, and I’m not really cut out for looking after other people. Except my crew, right, Gordo?” Gordo, making adjustments to a tripod in the corner, grunted. He was creating an extraordinarily elaborate setup, with a phone on a small tripod hanging beneath the bigger camera and lights everywhere that he began to turn off and on. Sabrina turned back to Amanda. “So you guys will win this thing, then settle in and make Frannie’s great? Spend the rest of your life here, bring the kids into the business?”
From her tone, Amanda didn’t think Sabrina was impressed. “Well . . .”
“Well? That sounds a little hesitant. Is there maybe more to Amanda Pogociello than fried chicken and the wide-open spaces of the prairie? My parents run a car dealership, and I like cars, but . . .”
Amanda laughed. “Of course there’s more. I love Frannie’s, and I love what I do here, so that really is the plan. But I do other things—” Should she tell Sabrina this? The other woman had moved closer, her face warm and interested. And it was just a hobby, really, not something that would ever get in the way of Frannie’s. “I like to draw.” That sounded so small, I like to draw, and now Amanda felt like she was being disloyal to the thing that filled so much of her free time—sometimes encroaching on time that wasn’t technically free—to the huge canvases that she painted on over and over because she couldn’t afford new ones, to the sketchbooks that served as her diaries, even to the chicken characters that had taken on a life of their own this past year. Those were easiest to describe. “I make these—comic books, I guess you’d call them. Graphic comic books. Not funny, mostly. About chickens.”
“Really?” Sabrina looked interested, and Amanda smiled back at her, glad that they were connecting. “That’s so cool. Is that what you were going to school for?”
Amanda laughed. “No, I was going to do something practical. Like accounting.” “Going to school” was a grandiose phrase for her efforts anyway. She had drifted into classes at the local college just like she drifted into everything else. It was only later, when the kids were little, after their school and her work and dinner and baths and bedtime, with Frank grading papers in the living room, that she’d tried to get a little more serious, always “making a mess” of the kitchen table.
Which led to the late-night arguments about whether they could move to Kansas City—just for a little while, a year or two—where she could take classes, maybe get her own art degree and teach, too. She had even applied to transfer the few credits she had to the college of art and design in Kansas City. She could have commuted, probably. Frank would have come around, would have seen that she could still make their life with the kids and Frannie’s work.
They would have figured it out. They would have. Or if they hadn’t—but no, they would have. But once he was gone, she never responded to the letter inviting her to remain on the wait list and send more of her work, to apply again the next year. Too much, too hard.
“I’m not that good,” she said. “It’s just something I do on the side.”
Sabrina smiled sympathetically. “When you get tired of chicken— I mean, do you get tired of chicken?”
Amanda laughed. She couldn’t help it. When she wanted to throw her Frannie’s uniform across the room, more like. When the smell, the grease, the way the soles of her work shoes always felt just a little slippery no matter what she did, surrounded her and wouldn’t let her go. But she didn’t need to say all that. “I guess,” she said. “It can get a little—the same, all the time. Which is what’s so great about your job. For you, it’s always something new.”
Sabrina looked at her without speaking for a moment, then laughed herself. “I guess so. It’s funny you draw chickens, though. Can I see them? Did you draw any of the chickens on the specials menu? Do you have any sketchbooks with you right now?” She looked searchingly at Amanda. It wasn’t really a question—and of course she was right. Amanda always had her current sketchbook with her, and this one was chock-full of chickens. Her eyes went to the coatrack, where her bag was hanging, and Sabrina sprang up. “Come on, you have to show me. I love it. Don’t get up. Tell me where. This one?”
Wait, really? Did she really want to show Sabrina her chickens? Sabrina might laugh—people were supposed to laugh, at least at some of it, but there was laughing and there was laughing. Too quickly, Sabrina had her hands on Amanda’s big tote, and she swung around, extending it to Amanda.
“In here?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t think I have anything.” She took the bag, trying not to snatch, and held it tightly in her lap.
Sabrina let it go and took up her place on the desk again. “Later, maybe?”
“If I can find anything,” Amanda said, still clutching her bag. “My bag is a mess. My whole house is a mess.” A mess where her art supplies were the one thing she could always put her hands on, but Amanda’s willingness to share had cooled off.
Sabrina smiled cheerfully. “Oh, mine too. I’m a total slob. It’s the worst. My family is always on me to clean up my act.”
Amanda jumped on the change of subject, even if this wasn’t one of her favorites either. But at least everybody felt like they were kind of messy. Except Mae, of course. “You have no idea. Nancy’s always telling me I should clean up a little at a time and stay after it, but it just doesn’t work, I get home so late and I’m wiped.”
“My mom keeps threatening to go clean out my apartment herself,” said Sabrina. “I’m like, Mom, just stay out of it. I’m happy this way.”
That was far from Amanda’s problem, but she did have one family member she’d match up against Sabrina’s mom every time.
“My sister hasn’t been here in ages, but if she saw my house, she’d be all over me. Supposedly she’s coming to help Mom with Mimi’s, though I’m not convinced she’ll show up. If she saw my kitchen now, she’d freak.”
Sabrina smiled. “Maybe we can keep her off your back. I didn’t know you had a sister coming—that’s perfect. Sisters started Frannie’s and Mimi’s, and now sisters running
Frannie’s and Mimi’s.”
“She doesn’t exactly run it.” Amanda rolled her eyes. “I mean, she hasn’t been in the place in six years.”
“We can stretch a little,” Sabrina said. “We like to tell a good story. So she’s coming back after being gone for a while? How’s that going to work? What’s she been doing?”
“I don’t think it is going to work,” Amanda said, happy to share her frustration. “My mom has always run Mimi’s on her own, but now she has this new cook she brought in, and she’s trying to drag Mae home—I don’t know what she’s thinking. They fight, when Mae’s here, even though when she’s not here, my mom is always talking about her. They’re a lot alike, except Mae is this obsessively neat and organized person and my mom is—” She stopped.
Her mom wasn’t something she wanted to talk about.
Sabrina looked interested. “Wait, is your sister Mae Moore? Who wrote Less Is Moore?” She paused, then laughed. “Oh man. That would be tough.”
Damn it, she knew who Mae was. Did everybody? But at least that made it easy to explain. “Exactly. And it sucks, you know? She literally wrote the book on being perfect, but in real life, she’s not so—I mean, she does do all that stuff, throw everything away, put everything back, keep it all clear—but she’s not so . . . fun about it. She’s more pissed.”
Sabrina again hopped down from her perch on the desk. “I know Mae,” she said casually. “It will be great to see her again.”
She knew Mae? Actually knew her? And Mae might be on her way here, to help with Mimi’s— Was that fair? Sabrina must have noticed how shocked Amanda looked, because the diminutive host leaned down and gave Amanda, who was still seated, a one-armed hug.
“It’s okay! We met a long time ago is all, and I see her around. TV is a small world. It doesn’t matter.” She plopped onto the floor next to Amanda’s chair. “It’s not like we’re friends. She seems like she might be hard to be friends with. I’ve got an older sister who’s like that, and we don’t get along at all.”
The Chicken Sisters Page 6
