The Chicken Sisters

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  She didn’t say, Another dead end, but Amanda knew she was thinking it.

  “Goddamn it, Mae,” she began, intending to respond to that slap about Frank. Amanda wasn’t interested in Andy at all, she’d tell Mae that, and that it was pointless trying to do anything with Mimi’s besides just make it through the weekend. But before Amanda could even decide how her sentence would end, they came to the bend in the path where the railroad track grading ended and you made your way down to the water. The big cottonwood that grew on the bank should be looming over them, its upright trunk just coming into view, the tree they’d climbed as kids, sat under, carved their names into.

  Instead, they saw a ripped stump. The tree itself lay across the bank and out into the water, a fallen giant, limbs stretched up to the sky.

  “Oh no.” Amanda put her hands over her mouth and stopped.

  Mae, in front of her, put a hand down on the bank to help herself down the steep slope. “Our tree! It’s—how long has it been down?”

  Amanda shook her head. “I don’t know. Mom didn’t tell me—I don’t know if she knew.” She felt more upset than she should have. The tree was old, and cottonwoods came down all the time; Amanda and Mae knew that better than most. It was one of the reasons people didn’t plant them in their yards anymore. But this had been their cottonwood. Her cottonwood. She had drawn it a hundred times, leaned on it, measured her height by its limbs. Somehow she’d thought it would last forever. From the look on Mae’s face, her sister must have felt the same way. Amanda made her way down next to Mae. The way the tree had fallen had erased the names they’d once carved into it, and the stump, while jagged, looked worn. She should have known something was wrong while they walked—the shade was gone, leaving the familiar path fully exposed. “It must have been a while ago. You’d think she’d have heard it, though.”

  Mae had turned her back on the tree, and on Amanda, and was staring out at the river. “Trees fall,” she said. “If there wasn’t anyone here to hear it, maybe it didn’t make a noise.”

  Amanda knew her sister was just trying to lighten the mood, but the comment set something off inside her. “Of course it did,” she said, and to her surprise, she was crying. “Of course it made a fucking noise, Mae. It was a big tree. It fell. It made just as big a noise as you can imagine.”

  Mae started to turn, probably to tell Amanda that she was only kidding, but Amanda had had enough of Mae’s jokes, and of Mae, and of everything. She turned around without saying another word to her sister, hitched up the tote bag that was slipping off her shoulder, and left. She didn’t need Mae’s help, or her sympathy, or her plan.

  She needed to go home.

  MAE

  Amanda was such a drama queen. Mae followed her up the slope, well aware that her sister wouldn’t stop until she got wherever she was going, and that wherever that was didn’t involve Mae. It was a tree, and, yeah, it was sad, but it was ancient history. Things changed, just like they’d changed between her and Amanda. Mae had hoped, with a shared mission, that they could at least slip back into their old ways a little. Weren’t they on the same side? Of course, that’s not the way Food Wars would see it, but in reality. The Merinac side, the make-this-a-huge-success side. Why wouldn’t her sister even listen to her? It would be so much better for everyone if they worked together behind the scenes, at least a little, but no. Amanda had to be stubborn.

  Mae squared her shoulders as she walked through the backyard, avoiding even so much as a glance at the house. She’d heard the door slam just before she came up the ridge, and now she could just see her mother disappearing in front of Mimi’s. On to the rest of the day. Step one: chase Barbara down. Mae sped up slightly. Step two: figure out how far Barbara would let her go in getting Mimi’s increasingly more camera-ready before each Food Wars appearance. Sadly, burn it down and start over was not a practical option, but scrape the counter area and the patio back to walls and concrete was, and Mae intended to persuade Barbara to let that happen.

  Mimi’s wasn’t going to win in a head-to-head beauty pageant with Frannie’s, and everybody knew it. But it could appeal to a certain subset of viewers—the ones who valued simplicity and authenticity over variety and constant change, who would prefer one classic, beloved, well-made handbag over a collection of cheap knockoffs.

  The ones like Mae, in other words, and the ones who would do two things: follow Mae, giving her increased visibility and setting her up for the next stage of her career, and, if they were at all local, come check out what Mae intended to bill as “fried chicken like your great-great-grandparents loved.” That would bring in a fresh influx of customers, all ready to see Mimi’s in a new light. Win-win, even in the face of an ultimate Food Wars loss.

  Because while Barbara might have been adamantly declaring that Mimi’s was in fine financial shape, all around her Mae could see the same old signs of penny-pinching—except, of course, for the bizarre advent of Andy. Which brought her mind back to her mother’s disappearance last night, also bizarre. Step one and a half: figure out whether there was a reason Barbara was acting so strangely, or whether this was just one of those Barbara things. That might be step three, actually, because if they were going to get anything about Mimi’s improved before the Food Wars crew showed up again, they didn’t have much time.

  Mae, now out on the sidewalk just past Mimi’s, could see her mother disappearing into the Inn. She set out after Barbara, not quite at top walking speed because the coffee shop was extremely likely to also contain Kenneth. Reunions weren’t on Mae’s agenda, as much as she wanted to hear the story—Kenneth had wanted out of town even worse than she had, and she couldn’t imagine why he’d trade pulling all-nighters at a start-up in San Francisco for pulling shots of espresso in Merinac. Later, though. Could she just pretend she already knew the whole thing? Her mother’s dog, sprawled on the sidewalk next to the Inn’s door, looked up but didn’t move as Mae grasped the handle and pulled it firmly open. Bells jingled, heads turned. Fine. She was a New Yorker now, a TV personality, a little bit famous. She put a little cock in her walk. She could handle this.

  Her mother’s back was to her, but the man behind the counter, who was not Kenneth, looked up immediately. “Mae Moore,” he said with evident pleasure, and set down the cup he was holding, as if to come out and greet her.

  Barbara leaned forward and tapped on the counter. “Patrick Lehavy,” she said without turning around, “you finish my coffee before you do one more thing.”

  Patrick, still smiling widely, picked the cup back up and began carefully topping it with frothed milk, looking up at Mae as he did so. “Welcome,” he said. “Kenneth has been assuring me you’d turn up sooner or later. Said you couldn’t hold out against the best coffee in town.”

  “It is that,” Barbara agreed. “Make Mae one—she’ll be needing it.” Her tone was casual, as though she and Mae ran into each other here every day of the week, but she turned and smiled at Mae, leaning back against the counter. Her hair, in two gray braids, hung over her shoulders; she wore, as she always did, a full floral apron over shapeless polyester pants and a high school sweatshirt—baseball, because it was spring. She looked exactly as she always had, and Mae felt an enormous loosening inside of her, an untying of knots she had not known were tied, as she walked straight into her mother’s outstretched arms.

  As they stepped apart, with Mae hanging on for just a half second longer than Barbara, Patrick handed Barbara a thick mug, filled not quite to the brim. “I think, if I am not mistaken, that I have already made Mae at least one coffee,” he said. “Am I wrong in thinking that the young woman who’s already been in here twice this morning works for you?”

  Of course. Nothing went without comment in Merinac. Not your coffee, not your groceries, not your decision to try running or subscribe to The New Yorker, which had once made Kenneth a topic of discussion all over town. It was a little ironic, then, that it was Kenneth’s husb
and who was heading up this morning’s gossip brigade, but as much as it pushed Mae’s old Merinac buttons, she held in the snippy response that rose to her lips and smiled back instead.

  “Yes,” she said, mindful of Amanda’s reaction to the word “nanny.” “I brought someone to help me with the kids.”

  To her surprise, her mother and Patrick nodded. “Probably smart,” Barbara said as she picked up her mug carefully, using both hands, and turned away. Greeting over, then, and it was time for Mae to fall into line beside her mother. This coffee shop, with its two gay proprietors and its lattes, should have felt like Mae territory, but it was Barbara who was at home here. Barbara’s affections were unpredictable and, once set, unchangeable, and she did not care what other people thought. It was why she always clicked with Jay on her rare visits to New York, where she refused to make the slightest alteration in her appearance to fit in with her surroundings. They shared that rebel quality.

  You just couldn’t ever be sure if she might choose today to rebel against you. Still, even with the nagging worry in the back of Mae’s mind about how Kenneth would greet her, even with the coffee grapevine in full swing, finding Barbara in this atmosphere made Mae feel like things might be going her way.

  Patrick didn’t leave her in doubt about Kenneth for very long. “You can wait for that third latte,” he said. “I’m getting Kenneth. I know, I know, you guys have lost touch. We’re fixing that. Right now.” He disappeared into one of the two doors behind the counter, this one clearly leading to the lobby of the bed-and-breakfast. “I’ll be back,” he called over his shoulder. “I know you won’t go anywhere without your coffee.”

  “He seems like a nice guy,” Mae said to her mother as she followed her to a pair of armchairs. The guy she would have wanted for Kenneth, once she had realized, almost before she had been old enough to have the thought, that Kenneth was not for her.

  “He is. Good to have Kenneth back in town, too.” Her mother pointed to the chair across from hers, which she took a little stiffly. “Sit. He’ll be a minute. Kenneth’s father has been sick. Alzheimer’s. You know all this?”

  Mae shook her head. She didn’t need to pretend with Barbara, who never wondered why other people did things.

  “Well, he’s helping his mom, and he sees a lot of his sister and her family, too. Nice.”

  Mae’s sense of connection disappeared. She knew where this was going. For so long, her mother had supported her choices, but lately Barbara had begun to ask just how long Mae intended to stay in New York—as though the city were temporary, a brief extension of college. It rankled. “Mom,” she started, and Barbara held up her hand.

  “Just stop,” she said. “It wasn’t about you. That’s what he’s doing, is all. You’re here to help with these Food Wars people, and that will be good, because I didn’t even realize when I called how much they would be into every little thing, and it’s hard to keep the kitchen going with them underfoot and asking questions. Nancy’s got Amanda to take care of all that. So you deal with them for me, and I’ll be happy.”

  Great. Now Mae, who admittedly wasn’t here wholly out of the goodness of her heart, felt guilty. Trust her mother to put a pin straight into Mae’s weak spot, and get in a shot at Amanda besides. Never mind that there were excellent reasons that neither of Barbara’s daughters were coming around for Sunday dinner every week. She parried. “Where were you last night, then, if it’s hard to keep going with them around? You left Andy kind of underwater. I mean, I did turn up, but I had the kids. I wasn’t much help.”

  “So you met Andy,” her mother said. “He’s an excellent cook. I’ve been really happy to have him. Food’s just as good as it always was.”

  Mae didn’t say anything to that. The food was just as good as it had always been, the chicken so exactly the same that it had almost made her cry, the fries better. Andy was a good cook. An asshole, but a good cook. That had not been her question. “Right, but where were you?”

  Barbara looked up toward the back an instant before Patrick returned, Kenneth trailing behind him. She might have heard them coming, but Mae suspected that her mother, always a private person, was intentionally avoiding what should have been an easy question. There wasn’t time to push her on it, though. Mae braced herself for Kenneth’s approach. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, Amanda’s reserved greeting had shaken her, and Barbara wasn’t much better. It wasn’t that she’d expected a parade, exactly. But neither was she quite prepared to be treated as though she’d either never been gone or never been here in the first place. She didn’t know what to expect from Kenneth, but she knew she didn’t deserve much.

  But both men were smiling, welcoming. Patrick seemed delighted to be engineering the reunion, and Kenneth, coming up with his arm around his husband’s shoulders, was clearly enjoying the other man’s excitement.

  “Mae,” Kenneth said, and reached down and pulled her out of her chair as though no time had passed at all. “Mae-my-Mae, how very, very nice to see you.”

  Mae hugged him, too, as hard as she had her mother. This was a Kenneth she had never known, at ease with himself and his surroundings. A Kenneth who, she could see at a glance, could afford to let the years he and Mae had gone without talking be water under the bridge, even though it had been he who had tried, a few times, to reach out and she who had ignored him, unable to allow any piece of Merinac to intrude into her new life.

  “You too,” she said, looking into his eyes and meaning it. When Kenneth walked into the room, something inside Mae clicked into place, and standing between him and Barbara, meeting Patrick—she was home, and the only thing missing was Jay, reaching out to shake Kenneth’s and Patrick’s hands, matching Kenneth’s smile.

  Kenneth might be enjoying himself, but with the thought of Jay, Mae felt her confidence ebbing away. She let go of Kenneth’s arms, noting his expensively, intentionally crumpled linen green gingham shirt. Eyeing the room, she observed that the Inn had been renovated with no expense spared—and no bank would have bet on this, which meant the money came from somewhere else. Mae had a sudden suspicion that it wouldn’t take more than a single Google search to tell her exactly how Kenneth had spent the last decade and a half, or where his newfound ease and wealth came from. She was ashamed not to have done it already. She should have known about the Inn, about Kenneth, and if she hadn’t been so determined to keep Merinac and everything that came with it in the past that she had swiped away its every possible appearance in her present, she would have.

  “We have hours of catching up to do,” said Kenneth, “but I know your mother, and her patience for a trip down memory lane is limited. Plus, you guys have a big day ahead. So let’s just pretend we already know everything and get on with it, shall we?”

  “Facebook has ruined reunions,” said Patrick sadly. “I, for one, want to hear both of you tell each other your entire life stories since high school. But”—he glanced at Barbara—“you’re right. Not now. So, what can we do to help make your Food Wars a success, ladies? Besides fuel you with superb coffee, which you will be sure to tell the camera came from the 1908 Standard?”

  “I do want to trade stories. I’m actually not that great at Facebook—I only use it professionally. I’m totally behind.” She smiled, she hoped with regretful charm, and went on. She took the flyer she’d printed this morning at the motel out of her LESS IS MOORE tote bag with a cautious glance at Barbara. Her mother liked to have Mae’s help, but one wrong word and she was likely to begin to see that help as bossy or, worse, back talk, and that would be the end of it. But her mother had always liked Kenneth and clearly liked Patrick. If they bought in, she might, too.

  Mae spoke carefully. “We might have a few things to do before the cameras show up. Maybe—straighten up a little?” A quick glance at Barbara showed a neutral face. “And I thought we might offer a special tonight. You guys could help share it, maybe, let people know?”


  Kenneth picked up on the dance Mae was doing as if they’d been planning ways to work around Barbara just yesterday. “Of course. Mimi’s looks great, its fabulous classic self, but there’s always something you can do for a camera. And a special is a great idea. What do you have?”

  “Chicken, of course,” said Mae. “Salad, fries. But with a slice of pie.” This was where it got dicey. Putting the pie on the special was a risk—there wasn’t always pie, especially if her mother was feeling pissed off at the world, but Mae figured even Barbara would pull out all the stops for Food Wars.

  “Perfect,” Patrick said, looking at Barbara, who smiled back at him, flooding Mae with relief. Pie it was, then. “Best pies in the world. We’ll share it like crazy.”

  Mae smiled. “Sweet,” she said. All she wanted was their help getting Barbara on board, but she would take the rest. “Every little bit helps.”

  Patrick looked at her sharply, and Mae realized he had caught the implied slight. His eyebrows went up. “Every little bit.” He laughed. “Show her, Kenneth.”

  Kenneth took out his phone (the latest, with no case, in the manner of the person for whom replacing a phone or a cracked screen was nothing) and opened Facebook. “We’ve been sharing Food Wars like mad,” he said. “Of course, we put an Inn spin on it.” Mae took the phone and scrolled down—it was a Merinac Main Street page, and she could see it was popular from the astonishing display of likes. The last posts were about supporting Food Wars, and one included a lengthy discussion about what a successful series could do for the entire town. Kenneth saw her reading it.

  “That’s nothing compared to the conversation on the Listserv,” he said, and took the phone back. “And of course we covered Twitter and Instagram, too. We’re huge on Instagram. I think you’ll probably have a lot of out-of-towners trying to get in tonight as well as the locals. Frannie’s, too. We told anyone who can’t get in to bring their takeout here. I warned Andy last week, and Amanda, too, to be ready for a rush.”