The Chicken Sisters

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  It felt like everyone in town was there. She saw Morty Rountree, famed for never wearing a shirt on his tractor between April and October, but wearing one now and braying cheerfully into the camera with his arm around his wife. “I don’t want her to cook every night,” he was declaring. “We like to get over here once every couple weeks or so, have the chicken.” Morty was a big presence, his wife more retiring and turning as best as she could away from the camera, but the affection between them was, as always, visible.

  Frankie showed signs of wanting to follow the camera, but the rest of the staff were making sure she put in a full night’s work, and more than once Amanda saw Gus save her when she set off from clearing a table with far too heavy a tray. She’d learn—and judging from the crash Amanda heard from the serving station at one point, she was learning the hard way, like they all did. She wanted to rush back to help with the mess and make sure they got all the glass, but things were too busy out front. Instead, she found herself pointing the district’s new art teacher toward the bar and promising him the shortest wait she could manage.

  “Oh man, I told you to come in, didn’t I? I didn’t know it would be like this—we’ll get you guys in as fast as we can.” She smiled at him, then peeped at the sleeping baby strapped to his chest.

  “That’s okay,” his wife said. “We don’t care. This is fun. Not exactly what we expected when we left St. Louis.”

  “Tell Mary Laura drinks are on us,” she said. “See you next week?” Last Tuesday, his weekly day at the elementary school, she’d been volunteering and wild with excitement. By Tuesday next this would all be over, but there wasn’t even time to think about that now.

  Frannie’s party atmosphere kept flowing even when, leaving a few cameras behind, Sabrina slipped out, presumably to go do the same thing at Mimi’s. As the tables cleared out, Mary Laura started passing around samples of her concoctions, and Amanda, who liked her drinks sweet and embarrassing, grabbed the excuse to order a Long Way from Long Island Iced Tea to top off her Sex on the Prairie. By the time she noticed that Mary Laura had commandeered the letter sign outside (Happy with Your Messy Life? Fight the Food War with a Not-So-Sparkling Wine) she was utterly sold on the idea of the drink specials. It was brilliant. She felt brilliant. Even the text from Kenneth she found on her phone once she finally retrieved it from Mary Laura—a little snarky, but a good idea—didn’t dampen her mood.

  The staff gathered around the bar as the various cleaning tasks wrapped up, playing to the camera as they postmortemed the night. Amanda felt a surge of love for them all. These were her friends. These guys were awesome. She never wanted to leave them. Gwennie had had multiple tables with toddlers and had taught one to say, “I love Fwannie’s best.” Mary Laura reported that the Soured on the City was going to be a permanent addition to the cocktail menu. Frankie’s feet hurt, casualties of the cool-but-flat Converse sneakers, and Gus offered to carry her to the car as the Food Wars crew started to fold up, shut down, and grab their own drinks.

  Amanda really wasn’t ready to go home. Tomorrow, once the professional chefs showed up, things would probably be far more tense. This was the fun part, but she, as always, was heading home with the kids. Reluctantly, she got up to follow Gus out, but Sabrina, back from Mimi’s and still going strong, stopped her. “Gus can drive, right?”

  Amanda nodded.

  “Let me take you home, then. Stay and debrief. I want to hear everything.”

  It was a tempting idea, and Gus seconded it, hefting his sister into a better piggyback position on his back while she shrieked.

  “We’ll just go home, Mom. You stay. It’s okay. Frankie needs her beauty sleep,” he said. That earned him a swat on the head from Frankie as he hauled her out, leaving Amanda behind.

  Sabrina was describing the night at Mimi’s. “They ran out of all the pie except banana, and someone offered your aunt Aida a hundred dollars to make her a chocolate cream to take home, and she gave her this look and said, ‘Young woman, I do not bake the pies. I present them.’ I just love her—she’s perfect. And your town is really coming out for this. I had to stop that one big guy from talking to the camera at both places.” She grinned. “I showed Mae your drink specials. She said they didn’t have anything to do with anything, but Andy and your mom laughed.”

  Nancy, coming in with fresh bar towels, raised her eyebrows, and then a look of understanding rolled over her face. “Oh,” she said. “I get it now. I was kind of wondering why all the New York stuff. You were trying to get at Mae.” She shook her head at Amanda. “It’s not about Mae, Amanda. It’s about Mimi’s and Frannie’s.”

  “I know,” said Amanda. “It was just a joke.” She could feel her high slipping. But it was a joke. And clearly everyone had loved the drink specials—Mary Laura’s beer pitcher tip jar with its COWS HATE BEING TIPPED, BUT BARTENDERS DON’T sign was stuffed to overflowing.

  “I get it,” said Nancy. “Just don’t take it too far. We don’t need”—she cast an unexpected glance at Sabrina—“any family drama.”

  Damn it, now Nancy was managing to sound like Mae. Amanda stared down at her drink, and her mother-in-law handed Mary Laura the bar towels. Mary Laura set them on the bar and offered Nancy a glass.

  “To a Frannie’s victory,” Mary Laura said, toasting cheerfully—hoping, Amanda suspected, to break up the mood. Nancy toasted, then slid her glass, still mostly full, back to Mary Laura. “One to hand wash, then,” she said, “so we don’t start the day tomorrow with any dirties. I trust you’ll all clean up after yourselves. I’m going to bed. Amanda, honey, are you sure you don’t want me to run you home?”

  After a glance at Sabrina, Amanda shook her head. Nancy was clearly going to pour cold water on her with a lecture about keeping things professional, but Amanda thought the little dig at Mae was funny and clever and well within the bounds of making Food Wars fun without “drama.” “I’ll get a ride,” she said.

  Nancy, still looking dubious, headed for the parking lot.

  Sitting at the bar while Sabrina quizzed Mary Laura about her love life, off camera, Amanda felt deflated. Why couldn’t Nancy just enjoy this? She ought to know Amanda could poke her sister a little without it turning into a big deal, and it wasn’t like Mae hadn’t said plenty about Frank and Frannie’s over the years. Amanda shoved the thought of her arguably explosive revelation about Mae’s stripper past firmly out of her head. Frannie’s would win, it would all be over, and there would be no drama.

  Amanda sighed and tuned back in to the conversation around her to find Mary Laura and Sabrina both looking at her quizzically.

  “What’s up?” Mary Laura asked, “Did we not have an excellent time tonight? Are we still not having an excellent time?”

  “Nothing. We did. We still are.” She pushed her glass toward Mary Laura, who filled it before gesturing toward Sabrina with the shaker.

  Sabrina covered her glass and shook her head, and with a flourish, Mary Laura emptied the rest into Amanda’s glass. “Excellent,” Sabrina said. “What we need now is somewhere to continue the party, and someone to continue it with.”

  Mary Laura laughed. “There’s nowhere to go around here,” she said. “Pull up a stool. We’re the only game in town, and normally we’d have closed an hour ago.”

  Nowhere to go, and nobody to go with. Amanda sighed again. “As usual, I’ll be heading home to my buddy Ben and my buddy Jerry.” She took too big a sip of her drink, and then, for good measure, another. She was not driving.

  “How about your buddy Andy?” Sabrina smiled and lifted her eyebrows suggestively. “He was asking about you tonight. Check your phone. Bet he texted you.”

  Amanda dug in her bag, under the Frannie’s shirt she had already changed out of. Her phone was off, as per Nancy’s rules for Frannie’s staff and the Food Wars filming suggestions. She powered it on: a long pause, then, yes, a notification. A text, from a number she
knew was Andy’s even though she had not yet given it a name.

  Hey, bet you were great tonight.

  As she read it, the telltale dots appeared. He was typing. Amanda felt a little surge of the same feeling that had lit her up last night when he brushed his hand up the back of her neck. He was typing. Right now. To her.

  I’m still cleaning up. Almost done. If there were anywhere to go I’d ask you if you wanted to get a drink.

  Sabrina was looking over her shoulder, and she read the last part out loud. “Come on, tell him you will. Tell him to come here.”

  Mary Laura shook her head. “I cannot be a party to this,” she said, and then laughed at the look on Amanda’s face. “Kidding! Honestly, I promised my boyfriend I’d come home after we close, and I already haven’t. I think he has champagne. He thinks this Food Wars thing is really cool. But you know Andy can’t come here.”

  “There has to be somewhere,” Sabrina said, and both Amanda and Mary Laura shook their heads.

  “Nope,” Amanda said. “This is why teenagers here hang out in the QuikTrip parking lot. There truly isn’t anywhere to go unless you drive a pretty long ways.”

  Sabrina hopped off her barstool. “Well, I left my notepad with all my stuff on it for tomorrow at Mimi’s anyway. So I have to go there. And there’s a parking lot there, too. You can channel your inner teenager. Tell him you’ll bring him a beer.”

  Mary Laura took two Schlafly Summer Lagers from the fridge behind the bar and set them on the counter. “There. You’re all set.”

  Amanda put her phone in her pocket. She knew she was getting bulldozed, but it was really just a little fun distraction—even if Mae and her mother would think it was a terrible idea. It was just the parking lot, it wasn’t like she was going in, and they were just texting. In fact, she wasn’t even doing that. She was just—going along for the ride. “I’m not telling him anything,” she said. She didn’t have to make a fool of herself. “No way. If he’s there, great. Otherwise, I’ve got two beers.”

  MAE

  Mae hoped to clean out Mimi’s to prepare for the second night’s filming, but she expected her mother to fight the removal of each and every bedraggled paper napkin. Instead, once the reunion with Madison and Ryder was over (a much warmer reunion than Barbara’s dry attitude had led Mae to fear; instead, she had found herself worrying over her mother’s willingness to take Ryder down the slide, which she had managed with surprising dexterity), Mae was standing in the tiny Mimi’s dining area, watching this strange woman—because this could not be her mother—direct Andy to pull everything out from behind the counter before Mae even had a chance to get a good look at what was there. They had fresh paint, they had a power washer, and they had a mission.

  “Just drag it all out,” Barbara commanded. “I’ll look at what’s worth keeping while you start painting.” She knelt and began prying open a can of paint, and Mae, who was carefully taking the pictures off the walls, ran to stop her.

  “No, Mom, not yet. We need to wipe everything down, tape off the windows. You don’t just paint over the dust.”

  Barbara shrugged. “I thought we were in a hurry here,” she said, but she put down the paint and straightened up. “Fine. You do it your way, then.”

  Mae considered this statement. Was Barbara about to pull back? She had this sense of balancing on a fine wire, unsure of what lay beneath. So far, Barbara had wholeheartedly and without hesitation bought into Mae’s vision for a quick overhaul. Yes to painting the walls and counter front, yes to carrying everything out of the tiny dining area and deep cleaning it, yes even to dumping the assortment of mismatched paper goods her mother collected.

  When Mae suggested they start by sprucing up the patio, Barbara called her friend Patti, now working in the Home and Garden department at Walmart, and asked her to take care of them; now Patti was out there, dropping fresh soil all over the place. Aida, after a warm hug for Mae, was supervising, pointing vigorously with her crutch, avoiding any actual work by gesturing dramatically to her broken foot, which she made look like a stylish accessory.

  “We’ll talk later, polpetta,” she said, and hearing her great-aunt call her little meatball—like Grandma Mimi and Mary Cat once did—made Mae blink and look away. Aida reached out to her all the time, actually, asking her about her book, about Sparkling, offering advice from her own TV career that was mostly wildly off base but occasionally on point. She even texted, and Mae suspected her great-aunt had bought the phone purely to communicate with her. Why hadn’t Mae taken the time to answer more often? She would, from now on.

  For now, though, Aida’s enthusiastic presence, along with Barbara’s strange mood of cooperation, were far more difficult to manage than Mae’s original plan, which involved something like sending her mother on an errand and then doing everything herself, quietly and without all this input from the peanut gallery. Having more than one cook in the kitchen was every bit as problematic as the proverb said.

  But this cleanup was clearly not going to be a solo act. Andy reappeared, followed by Zeus. “How about we paint, and you ladies sort through all the stuff outside?”

  Mae glanced at Barbara and saw that her momentary mutinous look was fading. Andy painting was probably the best use of time—if Andy would paint right. She held up the rags and the roll of painter’s tape. “You’ll use these, okay?” She didn’t care if she offended Andy.

  Andy took the tape from her hand. “Well, I was planning to just slop paint all over the windows and paint over the dead fly on the sill, but if you insist.”

  Mae, already running out of patience, glared at him and held on to her side of the tape roll. “Seriously. The details matter. I want this job done right the first time.”

  “He’ll do it right, Mae,” snapped Barbara, and Andy, with a smirk, pulled the tape from Mae’s hand, then relented. “I really will,” he said, too softly for Barbara to hear. “You help your mom sort through stuff, okay?”

  When they got outside, though, Barbara didn’t seem to want to go through the things they’d pulled out. She left Mae to it, wandering around instead, helping Patti for a moment, putting her head back into Mimi’s to ask Andy a question, then coming back before wandering off again, often with Aida trailing after her. That was fine, if a little odd. It gave Mae a chance to fill a trash bag with paper plates intended for a child’s birthday party—technically usable but completely unappealing—but it also made her nervous. Could her mother not just settle down, or go somewhere else? Maybe Mae could send her for more coffee, although coffee seemed to be the last thing Barbara needed.

  Finally, her mother came and stood next to her for more than an instant, holding the dog-shaped plastic bank the Humane Society provided for gathering contributions. “Do you really think we can win?” she asked softly.

  Oh no. No, Mae did not think they could win. She hadn’t even been considering winning. Frannie’s was bigger. It had a full menu, not just five uniformly unhealthy items plus doughnuts on Saturday mornings. It had a bar and a full staff. It was open for regular hours and everything was always available, unlike Mimi’s, where hours and pie choices were subject to Barbara’s whim. Mimi’s had appeal, yes—in Brooklyn it might win a cult following—but here, in the land where Applebee’s ruled, Frannie’s was the Goliath and Mae was short on slingshots. Mae would make Mimi’s look its best, show off what she could do on live camera, and boost her own brand. She did think it would help Mimi’s, but winning? No.

  “I don’t know, Mom,” she said carefully. If wanting to win was behind Barbara’s mostly cooperative spirit, Mae didn’t want to tear that down, but neither did she want to set her mother up for a fall. “I didn’t know you were worried about winning.”

  “Of course I want to win, Mae. Why else would we do this? That’s a hundred thousand dollars. I’m not just helping the Pogociellos take that home on a silver platter. They don’t need that money, never
have. And we do, Mae.” Barbara looked at Mae intently. “We do.”

  “Just being on Food Wars will bring more people to Mimi’s, Mom. It’s basically a win even to be asked.”

  “That’s not the kind of win I’m talking about, Mae. All this cleaning, painting—this is going to get us a real shot, right? Our food is better; everyone knows it. Theirs is—half of it is frozen. I see that big Sysco truck there all the time. And now Mimi’s will look like it should. So we should win.”

  Case closed, apparently. Mae hesitated. Could they win? Last night, looking around, she had spotted families she knew had been eating Mimi’s chicken for generations making the effort to come out for Food Wars. Her mother’s high school baseball sweatshirt had, she knew, been given to her by a grateful team: Barbara had donated the food for a fund-raiser again this year, and not just because baseball was Gus’s sport, and Gus was hands down her favorite family member. She did the same for every team, every year. Frannie’s was more polished. But Mimi’s was special, if Mae could just help the judges see it. And if Frannie’s really served frozen food to the judges, they wouldn’t like that one bit.

  Still. She wanted to muster up some honest hope for her mother, but it wasn’t happening. “I don’t know, Mom,” she finally said. “I’m here, and I’m going to do everything I can, okay?”