The Chicken Sisters

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  Amanda’s words, though, had set off something that Mae couldn’t keep from crashing into all of their spaces. Frankie didn’t know it yet, unless Amanda had told her, which Mae doubted. Gus didn’t know. Barbara didn’t know. They had all, along with Andy, been stripped bare by Food Wars, and what Mae felt above all was responsible. If she had said no to Barbara, if she had gone with her original gut that no good would come to Barbara from letting strangers into her private world, they would all still have each other. Instead, they were stuck in this weird limbo of a script someone else was writing, and even running away from it, as Mae was tempted to do, would be written in, would play out on this stage.

  She could take it, if she had to. Andy could take it. But anything Sabrina did besides nothing was going to cost her mother something, and she didn’t really believe Sabrina would do nothing. There would be something. Mae spent all afternoon trying not to imagine what.

  Even so, it wasn’t until she saw the Facebook post that she began to realize how much Food Wars could do—or how much of Barbara’s world they could destroy.

  * * *

  ×

  The video, posted to the Food Wars Facebook page, started with a confusing image. On closer inspection, Mae saw it was a squirming pile of puppies. Then, as the camera pulled back, Patches, tongue out, looking quite content (as she should; there was a visible pile of dog treats in front of her). And then, as the camera pulled back more . . .

  Shit.

  Oh shit.

  Oh fuck.

  As the camera pulled back more, there was the inside of her mother’s house. How? How had they gotten in, without her even knowing? The dog bed turned out to be partly on a sofa and partly on a coffee table pulled up in front of the sofa. The rest of the sofa, and the floor in front of the sofa, was piled with things, with closed boxes and open boxes with rolled paper and tool handles sticking out, stacks of magazines and more paper, clothing on hangers, in dry-cleaning bags, over the tops of boxes and the back of the sofa.

  The view changed to the kitchen, to stacks of unwashed dishes next to equally filthy pans next to new sets of pans and Tupperware, still in boxes, with open cereal boxes on top of them, and on the floor, still more. As Mae stared, horrified, the camera zoomed in on the bottom of a fifty-pound bag of flour, clearly chewed through, and—Goddamn it, how had the cameraperson gotten so lucky?—a mouse skittered out and disappeared under a nearby pile of coats.

  She read the post above the video: Is this what you want when you go grab some fried chicken? Turns out someone in this Food War has more than a little problem. Can über-organizer Mae Moore clean up anyone’s act, especially when the mess hits close to home? Find out on tomorrow’s mini webisode of Season Four, Round Three of GHTV’s Food Wars.

  There were comments. Hundreds already, still coming. At first, mystified—What is this, whose house is it?—then, of course, as people figured it out, as locals weighed in on what she’d always known was an ugly open secret in their small town, exactly the disgust you’d expect. She runs a restaurant? Makes the pies there? Gross!

  Not everybody loved Mimi’s, or at least, as she had always known, some people were happy to hit anyone who was down.

  There was even an extensive thread about the dog. How can anyone raise puppies like that? That can’t be safe for the animals! Someone get those puppies out of there! I hope you called the ASPCA before you even took this video, shame on you if you didn’t I will take the dog and the puppies when they are taken away please message me ASAP

  And so on.

  Mae closed her phone, then, unsatisfied, opened it again, intending to turn it all the way off, to lock it in the glove compartment, to leave it behind completely, except that now there was a message, dropped down over red notifications lighting up the little gleaming icons of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, as if to shout over them all.

  Really? This is who you are now, an episode of Hoarders? You’re going to exploit some poor hick’s mental illness for your fame or whatever? Come on, Mae. You’re better than that. Don’t let them drag you down.

  She had thought she’d braced herself for this, but she hadn’t. The text was a punch to the gut, one Jay must have fired off before even reading the comments, because it wouldn’t take more than a quick skim to realize that Food Wars was hardly what was dragging her down. He must have seen by now that the “poor hick” was Barbara. He would know that the Mae he had married was, at least in part, a lie, that she wasn’t the solid other half she had pretended to be.

  And he hadn’t texted her again.

  That was it, then. There was no running away now. There was nowhere—no one—to run to.

  She should have stayed home. Should have listened to him, accepted the Sparkling verdict, found some other way forward. Of course this plan had turned on her. How could she have expected the very place she wanted to erase from her past to help her find her way? She should have trusted Jay. Jay, who, she had to admit now, really wasn’t trying to ruin anything with his plan for them both to take a break. He just wanted a say in the life they were supposedly building together, and she’d been so busy building it herself that she had barely noticed when he started questioning his part. Just as surely as Sabrina had been single-mindedly setting up the story she wanted to tell, Mae had ignored the fact that some of the players on her stage weren’t happy with their roles, and now someone else was directing the show.

  She walked into Mimi’s, where the cameras and the night’s crowds had not yet arrived, unable to disguise her feelings, and as she came through the back door her mother and Andy stopped their conversation and stared at her. It was clear from their expressions that her own emotions were written all over her face.

  Andy was the first one to speak. “What happened?” His voice was calm, but as he spoke, he placed a hand under Barbara’s arm, as though he thought he might need to hold her up, and Mae loved him for it.

  “They know,” she said, and, seeing that Barbara had of course not understood, explained. “About the house, Mom. Food Wars. They took a video.” Suddenly she couldn’t bear to tell her mother what people were saying about her home, about the dogs. “It’s bad, Mom.”

  Barbara reached out a hand, and Mae gave her the phone, where the video was looping over the stream of comments. Andy leaned over her, his arm around his boss, watching quietly. After a moment, Barbara handed the phone back without a word and turned to the counter where she had been working. Mae felt a fury boiling up inside her, with Sabrina, yes, with Amanda, of course, but also with her mother, the person she loved most in the world or at least had loved for the longest. How could her strong, brave, smart mother, a woman who could do anything in the world she set her mind to, let this happen? How did they always end up right back here, with Barbara’s mess threatening to destroy their world?

  If Barbara had an answer, she wasn’t offering it.

  She was making salad dressing. Mae watched, waiting as long as she could, while Barbara carefully began measuring in the sugar.

  “Well?” she finally said.

  Barbara looked up, and with a wrenching twist to her insides, Mae saw that her mother was trying not to cry. “I take really good care of Patches,” she said, setting down the jar they used to mix the dressing. “She’s perfectly safe. The puppies are healthy; they’re the healthiest puppies you ever saw. And I’ll get her fixed, I was going to, this happened too fast, we already even had the appointment, I’ve told Jared Brown again and again that he can’t let that big Lab of his run loose without fixing him, but he’s a man, won’t do it.”

  “But, Mom—how did they even get in there? Did you let them in?”

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t know.”

  “Aunt Aida?” That might make sense. She loved a camera.

  “She would never, Mae. And no. She’s been helping that woman who has the new tattoo shop, over in Bradford. I dropped he
r off this morning.”

  Andy hit a fist against the cabinet, shaking the entire kitchen, making even the pans hanging above the counter rattle and keep rattling, longer than they should have, jangling with all the energy in the tiny building. “They can’t just go into your house,” he said, and Mae spoke over him, glad to have an outlet for her own anger.

  “It doesn’t even matter; it’s out there, however they got it. People have seen it. People will see it. And it’s not just Patches, Mom. The flour. Do you use that to make the pies? Are you still working in there?” The dog, yes. But the restaurant. If she was cooking for Mimi’s in that kitchen, and people knew it—

  “That’s an old bag. Of course I keep all the supplies for Mimi’s safe, Mae. I’m just as careful as I ever was. I can’t believe you’d even think that. I didn’t make the pies this week anyway. Patrick did.” Barbara was calming down, her anger carrying her past her tears.

  Mae shook her head. The lines her mother somehow drew around her mess, around her problem, had always amazed her, and Barbara’s outrage that anyone would think she might carry that filth out into the world could sometimes be almost funny, but not now. Even the image of Aunt Aida in a tattoo parlor wasn’t helping. The puppies were not the problem. Even the pies were not the problem, although it helped that Patrick had baked this week. “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she said. “It’s what everybody else thinks. What are we going to do?”

  “Call Sabrina and tell her I take good care of Patches and that none of this has anything to do with Mimi’s. None of it.”

  That, at least, was a call Mae was spoiling to make.

  AMANDA

  Nancy picked Gus and Frankie up for the night at Frannie’s early, pulling into the driveway while Amanda, who had decided that hard work was the only thing to quiet her churning brain, was in her front yard, hacking away at the overgrown grass and weeds around her front steps with the vague idea of planting annuals and making it all look better, but mostly just to sweat and have something to curse out. Her small flock of chickens kept getting in the way, delighted by the soil she was flipping over, and more than once she’d nearly taken one out with the shovel, which just felt like exactly the kind of day she was having, especially now that she was frantically showering and realizing that the sweaty Frannie’s shirt from this morning was still the cleanest one she had.

  She was done with Food Wars. This had all been a terrible idea, and the best thing she could do now would be to just put her head down and ignore it. She didn’t know what she would do when Nancy found out that Sabrina thought they had stolen the Mimi’s recipe, or that she had told Sabrina to go look at Barbara’s house. Amanda was just going to—go. And do her job. And she was never going to try to make anything happen ever again.

  When she finally got to Frannie’s, she found Gus and Frankie standing outside the door, very clearly waiting for her. She didn’t want to talk to them, or anyone. They would know she didn’t take the recipe—they would believe Nancy, if not her—but how would they feel when they knew why she’d been in Mimi’s in the first place? Did they know? From the looks on their faces, she could tell something was wrong.

  “Mom,” Gus said, pressing his phone into her hand, “you need to watch this.”

  Frankie was between her and the door. “Someone told Food Wars about Grandma Barbara’s house. It’s on Facebook.”

  So it wasn’t Mae accusing her of stealing the recipe, then. Her relief came and went in an instant. The house was on Facebook? But Barbara would never let them into the house.

  She looked down at the phone in her hand. It was a video, already playing. She saw a mouse skittering out of the bottom of a bag of flour, and then the video restarted, focused on Patches, who must have had the puppies, then pulling back to show the mess around her, which wasn’t that bad, considering. It had been worse. It pulled back further, showing the kitchen—okay, that was bad.

  Is this what you want when you go grab some fried chicken? Turns out someone in this Food War has more than a little problem. Can über-organizer Mae Moore clean up anyone’s act, especially when the mess hits close to home? Find out on tomorrow’s mini webisode of Season Four, Round Three of GHTV’s Food Wars.

  Scrolling down, she saw that people had guessed it was Barbara—of course they had; everyone in town would know it—and boggled at all the comments about the food and the pies and the puppies.

  “How did they know?” Frankie demanded. “It’s none of their business.”

  Amanda knew the answer to that, of course, but how did they get into the house? Barbara would barricade the doors before she would let them film in there. She read the words again. Can über-organizer Mae Moore clean up anyone’s act? Was there any chance Mae had decided to turn this to her advantage and try to get Food Wars to film her cleaning? Because everyone knew that was what Mae wanted most—for the whole world to know she had her life under control and could handle everyone else’s besides.

  She looked more carefully at the post, scrutinizing it for signs of her sister’s handiwork, knowing in her heart that there was no way Mae would reveal her mother’s shame like that, both for her own sake—Mae had said all along that the one thing they didn’t want Food Wars to do was see the house—and, if Amanda was honest, for Barbara’s. In all those years of Mae fighting Barbara, trying to clean the place up, trying to change her, Amanda had never seen Mae allow anyone else to criticize her. At the faintest suggestion from a teacher or another parent that Barbara could do better, no matter how much Mae might secretly agree, she instantly rose to Barbara’s defense. Mae’s loyalty to Barbara never faltered.

  But she had no loyalty to Amanda at all. Amanda would never have told Sabrina about the house if Mae hadn’t betrayed her already, making up this stupid story about the recipe and putting Amanda right in the middle of it. Barbara probably knew what Mae had done, or if she didn’t, she would soon enough, and she wouldn’t care. Her mother always thought the sun shone out of Mae’s ass.

  They didn’t deserve anything from Amanda. And was this even really that bad? Mae could help Barbara clean it up. And Mae should help Barbara clean it up. All these years, it had just been Amanda, going in every so often to try to deal with the worst of it, to make sure that her mother wasn’t eating anything that could kill her, that she still had a chance of getting out if the house caught fire, with Barbara scolding her to just leave things alone. Not even wanting her there. Amanda should have left her alone a long time ago.

  It was Mae’s turn. Nothing that bad could happen now. She and Mae weren’t little girls to be taken away. They were grown-ups. Barbara was a grown-up. It was time she faced her own mess.

  Amanda turned to Frankie. Mae’s apt words from earlier came to her mind. “I guess I would say that if you don’t want people to know you’re doing something, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it.”

  Frankie looked at her mother, and her eyes widened. “You told, didn’t you?”

  Gus stared at Amanda. “Wait, you told?”

  Slowly, Amanda nodded.

  “But they’re going to take Patches away,” Frankie said. “She loves Patches. Mom, I can’t believe you let them do this!”

  “I didn’t ‘let’ them do anything. I don’t have any idea how they got into the house. But the mess—they needed to know. Don’t you guys want to win?” Amanda asked. “I mean, this is real. Her house really looks like that. She really does make the pies there.” And her famous lemonade cake with sprinkles, for every one of Gus’s and Frankie’s birthdays, and most of Amanda’s. And the chewy oatmeal chocolate chip cookie that sold out first every time one of the kids’ clubs had a bake sale. But that didn’t excuse her horrific mess of a house. “It’s not fair to have people judging Mimi’s against Frannie’s if they don’t know that.” Amanda felt a swell of righteousness. If they could tell lies about her, why shouldn’t she tell the truth about them?

  �
�But you had to know she would find a way to get in,” Gus said angrily. “They film everything. They’re everywhere.”

  “I’m sorry, but I had to.” They didn’t know why, not yet, but Amanda couldn’t bear to tell them. “They were saying stuff about Nancy and me, okay? And it wasn’t even true. This is.” She pushed past them, knowing that once she was inside, she’d be able to count on her kids not wanting to fight in front of the cameras. They’d know eventually. Everyone would know everything eventually. But for now, couldn’t she just go serve some people some fucking fried chicken?

  She should have known she couldn’t. As she seated customers and moved back and forth through the dining room, she felt an increasing sense of being watched. In spite of Nancy’s long-standing rules about phones for staff on the floor, she saw them being passed from hand to hand, huddled around, and then shoved out of sight when she or Nancy appeared. Pinky Heckard made a joke about avoiding the “mouse-dukey pies” at Mimi’s. She’d gone to school with Pinky. He ate erasers—that was how he got his nickname. Pinky’s mother pressed Amanda’s hand, as if in sympathy. “Your poor mother,” she said. “At least she can get some help, but this must be hard.” No one mentioned the recipe. No one seemed to know about the chicken. But it had to be coming.

  Mary Laura made her way out of the bar in a lull to lean on Amanda’s hostess station, eyeing her, keeping a lookout for the cameras. “God, girl,” she said. “Was that you? Or did Mae or Barbara let something slip?”