The Chicken Sisters

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  “My God,” he said, and pushed harder on the door. “Frank, look at this.” Out on the sidewalk Mae saw a man she recognized. He owned Frannie’s, she thought. And he had a big car, a big red car with no top that he drove everywhere all summer long, and a little boy who was in Amanda’s kindergarten who rode in back and always got ice cream. That man came and looked in behind the first man, who was pushing on the door and trying to get past her.

  The door didn’t open any farther—Mae could have told him that. There were boxes behind it, and a big piece of countertop leaning on them. Sitting on top was a doll Mae didn’t like, with arms and legs and a face made of ladies’ hose stuffed with something and tied with thread to create fingers and a nose, chin, and toes, wearing a feathered hat. There was tons more, too, but that was mostly what kept the door from opening.

  She tried to block his way, but he pushed past her, and when she turned to try to get in front of him she saw that Amanda had finished coloring and was trying to push her barstool back and climb down.

  “Manda, wait,” she called.

  “I’m coming,” said Amanda, and shoved herself back as hard as she could. The barstool tipped backward and Amanda shrieked, but instead of hitting the ground, the stool was caught by the box stacked on the end table behind it, and Amanda rolled off over the box, over the arm of the sofa, off the sofa, and onto the floor. The man had pushed Mae aside and tried to rush to Amanda, but he tripped and nearly fell on her instead, and Amanda began to scream.

  “It’s okay!” the man shouted above Amanda, reaching for her. “Are you okay? Where does it hurt?”

  Amanda rolled onto her back and kicked up, catching the man sharply under the chin so that he screamed too, a sort of strangled argh sound as he collapsed onto the sofa. Amanda, surprised by the success of her move, paused in her screaming, but the room didn’t quiet, because Barbara, still young then, still thin, still angry, slammed the open front door into the stack of boxes again.

  “Gary?”

  Her face was pale, and as the other man, the convertible man, tried to come in behind her, Barbara elbowed him in the gut.

  “You get out of here, Frank Pogociello. I know your daddy sent you, but you’ve got no right to be in here, no right. This house is not for sale.” Mae could tell her mother was mad. Madder than she’d ever seen her, maybe, and seeing this, she ran around the fallen man, grabbed Amanda, and stood in front of her little sister like a shield.

  Barbara didn’t scream at the man in the house. Her voice got real low, real quiet. “Gary Logan, you get out. You get out right now, before I have to figure out what I’m going to do if you don’t.”

  “I just want to talk to you. I want to see the girls.”

  “You don’t just show up here trying to talk and see. You don’t just show up anywhere. Right now, I want you to get out. If that’s all you want, if you just want to talk, then you call me, and then we’ll see. You don’t go sneaking in here without me.”

  The man stood up. “I thought you were here,” he said. “Hear that, Frank? She wasn’t here, and this child opened the door right up for us. Couple of strangers.”

  “Oh, I was here,” Barbara said. She was talking fast now, right over him. “I was here. I was out back, and I heard you come sneaking in.”

  The man edged past Barbara, squeezing through the boxes, and looked out the front door. “That car wasn’t here before,” he said. Mary Cat was coming slowly up the walk.

  “It was.” Barbara crossed her arms. “I don’t care if you didn’t see it.”

  He looked back at Mae. “She wasn’t here, was she, Mae?” he asked.

  Mae was a fast thinker, and she knew her mother. If Barbara lied, she would lie. She crossed her own arms. “She was.” Mae heard Amanda get up behind her. Amanda was a truth teller, every time; she could not be made to see that sometimes it was better that grown-ups and other people not know everything. Mae knew what she had to do. She bent her leg and kicked backward, hard as she could, and felt her foot make contact. Amanda screamed again and fell over, holding her arms wrapped around her stomach and rolling from side to side, and Mae turned around and made her fiercest face at her sister, hoping she would understand so Mae would not have to kick her again. Their eyes met, and Amanda shut her mouth up firm and lay still.

  “I was in the back,” Barbara said. “Gardening.” Now that she was between the man and the girls, she started walking toward him, willing him out the door.

  Mary Cat stood aside as if to let him by. She seemed to know who he was. “Gary,” she said. “I take it you were just leaving?”

  The man ignored her and turned back to Barbara. “This place is a shithole,” he said. “It’s— What is all this?”

  Barbara Moore’s house might have been a mess, but she herself was not. She brushed off the front of her blouse casually, as if to suggest that no speck of dirt would last anywhere near her, and said firmly, “We have just inherited a few things, and I have not yet unpacked. But you will not be here long enough for it to bother you.”

  Gary Logan kicked the stack of boxes nearest him, and the doll perched on top fell over. “That was your mother’s,” he said. “She died five years ago, Barb. Seriously, what is all this crap?” He turned to look down the hallway, and Barbara seized this opportunity to take him by both shoulders and march him out the door, following and slamming it behind them. The windows that would have shown Mae what happened next were covered, but she could hear her mother shouting.

  Amanda sat up. “Is he gone?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You kicked me. And she wasn’t here. You know it.”

  “I know.”

  “She lied. You lied.”

  Mae shrugged. She knew that, too, and while she didn’t know why she’d lied, she knew she’d been right to do it. When they heard Barbara coming back inside, the girls rushed back to the counter and resumed coloring, heads down.

  “Who let him in?” Barbara’s voice was low and fierce.

  Mae kept her eyes on her coloring book. “I— Amanda fell off the stool. I opened the door and Amanda fell off the stool and he came in.” Mae knew that Amanda wouldn’t say anything now, even if she’d seen something different. She wouldn’t lie, but sometimes she could keep her mouth shut.

  “I told you not to open that door. I told you, while I’m gone, don’t you open that door to anybody. Not anybody, no matter what they say.”

  Mae thought she just wasn’t supposed to let anybody in, but she didn’t argue. Barbara turned and walked back out the door. She spoke over her shoulder as Mary Cat took a glass from the sink, rinsed it out, and opened the refrigerator, ignoring them all.

  “Get your shoes. Get in the car.”

  Mae and Amanda, confused, didn’t move.

  “I’m not leaving you here again. Now!”

  They drove straight to the big house where her mother’s best friend lived, and Barbara went in, leaving them in the car. After a while, Barbara and Patti came out and they all drove home together; Patti held the girls’ hands as they followed their mother into the house. Mae got her sister a coloring book, but Amanda didn’t open it, just held it tight. Instead, they watched as Barbara and Patti, and then more grown-ups, filled boxes and bags and carried them out, then came in and did it again and again. Amanda’s head rested heavy on Mae’s shoulder before falling into her lap, and Mae laid her own head down on her sister, just for a minute, while she tried to figure out what was going on.

  When she woke, the room was so empty that she didn’t recognize it. There was the sofa, the big chair beside it, and in front of them both a glass-topped table Mae barely remembered, with two magazines carefully stacked on it next to an empty ashtray. There was a round rug over the worn carpet, and a set of glass shelves against the wall holding nothing but the television and two bookends shaped like monkeys with their hands over their m
ouths or eyes. The whole thing gleamed, from the mirrored silvery supports to the sparkling clear shelves.

  It was the most beautiful thing Mae had ever seen. Mae got up and walked over to the shelves, putting her head under and staring up through the glass. It was so clear she could see straight up, and she lay down in the center of the room and spread her arms and legs wide, making a snow angel in the rug, then rolled all the way to one side, then the other, basking in the space to move. She had never even known how much she wanted this until now.

  Did the rest of the house look this way? She heard voices in the kitchen and followed them, walking quietly with tiny steps through the neat room.

  Patti was standing on a chair, wiping out a cabinet. Her mother stood beneath her, a Smurfs glass in each hand, ready to hand them up. The kitchen was as clean as the living room. Mae wanted to eat at that clean counter, drink from that Smurfs glass, stay in this kitchen forever.

  “Can I have some cereal?”

  Her mother turned, and one of the glasses—the best one, the one with Smurfette—slipped from her hand and shattered. Her mother stared down at the mess, and Mae froze as Barbara lifted the other glass above her head and dropped it. Glass flew even farther.

  “Barbara . . .” Patti climbed carefully down from the chair. She had on shoes. Barbara was in her stocking feet and Mae, barefoot. “Don’t move, Mae, honey. Not one step.”

  Amanda, also barefoot, appeared in the door, and Patti picked her up and swung her up on a counter, then lifted Mae up next to her. “I’ll get a broom.”

  Barbara didn’t move her feet, but she put her hands on her hips and looked right at Mae.

  “You let a world of trouble in here last night,” she said. “Gary Logan wants nothing but money, and that friend of his, that Frank Pogociello, he’ll steal this house right out from under us if he can. We can’t give them any excuse to go snooping around, you hear me? If they think I can’t manage, and bring in social, they’ll take you two away. Is that what you want? Is it? Because that’s what you did, when you let him in.”

  Patti ran back in without the broom.

  “They don’t know, Barbara. Stop.”

  Mae stared at her mother, trying to understand. Barbara walked right through the glass and put her hand under Mae’s chin, talking straight into her face. “Now it’s clean, and it will stay that way, but if you tell anyone it wasn’t, or that I left you alone here, that gives them a way in, do you see? People think a woman alone can’t do anything, and just because we don’t have money, because I need to work and I can’t be spending all my time making it pretty around here, they think they can run right over me and get what they want, and what they want is to get us out of here, pave this place over, turn it into a parking lot or something. And we are not going to let that happen.”

  Mae nodded, and Patti said, “Barbara. You’re scaring her. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  “I told you what Mary Cat said,” said Barbara. “If they make that mortgage due—”

  “They won’t. There’s no reason to.”

  “They could take it all away, Patti. And we—the girls and me—”

  Mae was scared. Who would take what away? What had she done?

  “It’s okay, Mae,” said Patti, but Mae didn’t believe her. She didn’t believe anyone but her mother, and her mother did not look okay.

  Mae crawled over the counter and off on the other side, away from the broken glass.

  She picked up the broom and took the dustpan in her other hand. “I can make it pretty, Mama,” she offered. “While you work.”

  It took years for Mae to realize that she could not keep that promise no matter how hard she tried. Her father had never returned, at least as far as she knew. “Dead of his drinking, and good riddance,” her mother said a few years later, when she asked, and Mae couldn’t find the energy to care. Frank Pogociello came around a few more times, knocking, and even left papers taped to the door, which were the only things Mae ever saw her mother manage to throw away.

  The house, though, reverted to its previous state within a matter of months. Twice more, Barbara’s friends, and later Mae and Amanda, took the house all the way back down to the bones, and twice more it returned to chaos. Entropy happened fast on Barbara’s watch, and as Mae stood outside the house now, she understood that it had been a long time since anyone had tried to stop it. She had no intention of trying. Her only involvement with her mother’s house on this trip would be to prevent Food Wars from coming anywhere near the place.

  From somewhere behind her she heard a car door slam, and she took off at a run, thinking it was Madison or Ryder. But when she reached the edge of the house, she saw taillights turning out of the parking lot. Amanda and Andy, then, leaving, faster than she would have expected. She’d have to find Amanda in the morning. Barbara too. Damn.

  It was late, but Mae felt restless. Time to make things happen. She yanked out her phone and texted her sister as she walked. Didn’t want to interrupt you and Andy. Slick moves, chick. Meet me after your school drop-off. We need to make a plan.

  The back door of Mimi’s hung open, and as she reached in to shut it, she felt the gloom wrap around her in a way that it had not when Andy, Angelique, and Zeus were bustling around. The whole place spoke to Mae of decay and despair, and always had, in spite of the bright yellow paint. The first Mimi had started it not out of a burning desire to share her family chicken recipe but out of desperation when money first got tight, and it never loosened up. In the picture that had always hung on the wall she looked pinched and worried, and she was no happier in a later picture with the two daughters who would become Mary Cat and Mary Margaret, the second Mimi, the old ladies of Mae’s childhood.

  Enough Mimis, enough memories. Mae spun around, away from the picture, waving her arms to stir things up as she went. Clearly it was time for bed. It was a warm night, but Mae felt a familiar chill as she walked out the front door and let it shut behind her. There was a shitload of ghosts in here, and most of them weren’t even dead.

  AMANDA

  Amanda woke up to the sound of Frankie in her closet.

  Her head was pounding. She’d slept poorly, which was typical, and her last memories were of a dream with Frank in it, dark hair freshly trimmed and wearing the khaki pants and button-down he wore to teach, frying chicken at Mimi’s and telling her to go back to Frannie’s, never once turning so that she could just see his face. What she wanted was Pickle, whose heavily panting presence was the lullaby that kept her sleeping. But Pickle was gone, and Amanda still wasn’t used to it.

  Yesterday had not ended well, and everything she’d gone to sleep trying not to think about was still there today. Mae showing up in Merinac after Amanda had convinced herself that she wouldn’t, and then sending that text, summoning Amanda to the royal presence. Where the hell had Mae been that she’d been spying on Amanda without Amanda seeing her? What business was it of hers? Sabrina, who had been so nice but still left Amanda feeling a little like everyone felt sorry for her, and then the stupid impromptu haircut, which had attracted far too much attention last night at Frannie’s. Her kids and Nancy all said it looked good, but they were probably just trying to be nice. She put a hand to her hair, which felt shorn on the sides, and pulled angrily at the springy curls that at least remained on top. How fast could this grow back? She’d have to find a baseball cap. There was probably one in the closet. With Frankie.

  “What do you want in there? At least let me find it for you.” Frankie in her tiny walk-in closet was a shortcut to catastrophe; she had no respect for Amanda’s system, with the handful of things she actually wore in the front on the right, winter clothes jammed into the front left, and the piles of things she needed to sort and maybe give away pushed up carefully under the older hanging stuff in back.

  “I’m not looking for me,” Frankie said, and turned to dump an armful of hangers and unfolde
d items onto Amanda’s bed. Amanda winced. System destroyed, plus now all of this would be on the floor next to her bed for the next month or more.

  “We have to figure out what you’re wearing today.” Frankie riffled through her choices. “This does not look good on you anymore; you need to either get a waist or get rid of it. This isn’t bad, but the pattern will look awful on a screen. This”—she threw a three-quarter-sleeve T-shirt with a crisscrossed neck in a bright blue at her mother—“this is pretty good. It’s a good color for you. Do you have any clean jeans that are decent?” She pulled out a pair from her pile. “There is really no way you can still wear these. Why don’t you go through here and get rid of the stuff you don’t want?”

  Honestly, she sounded like Mae, and it had never been more horrifying. “I like those jeans,” Amanda protested.

  “They make you look like you’re wearing a sack on each leg.” Frankie walked around to the side of Amanda’s bed and looked down at the pile of clothes on the floor. “Wear the ones you had on yesterday; they’re not awful. With sandals.”

  “I’m not wearing sandals to work! And I can’t wear any of that, anyway. I’m wearing the Frannie’s shirt, and so are you.”

  “You can wear this for the first part,” Frankie said. “Make it look like you’ve just come to work from the rest of your great life. And if there’s a part where you talk to the camera, you can ask to change. The Frannie’s shirt makes you look like you’ve been sick for a week. Your hair is awesome, at least. You can’t mess that up.”

  Frankie disappeared in the direction of breakfast and the school bus, where she would no doubt bask in the reflected glory of the first day’s Food Wars filming, whereas Amanda, who had not very much enjoyed being told that she was shapeless and pale, got up slowly, avoiding the mirror on the closet door, which told her that Frankie was right. At least Frankie was being nice about it, even if she did remind Amanda of a slightly more docile version of her sister. Frankie didn’t know yet that Mae would be here for Food Wars, and Amanda was avoiding telling her. Frankie had written about her largely unknown aunt for a school essay (“write about someone you admire”), and her teacher had scrawled, How nice that you have a successful family member to look up to, across the top.