The Chicken Sisters

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  That didn’t answer her question. Not even close. “But where—”

  “Friday, when you were talking about the chicken always being the same—right after they asked about the biscuits—and Tony Russell was complaining that it wasn’t, Gus was right there. He started joking, afterward, about Tony not knowing where the recipe was hidden. I realized that Gus knew where it was.”

  “I never knew Grandma didn’t have the recipe,” Gus said. “I just assumed she did. So I showed her, and we made the chicken together for Saturday morning.”

  “That’s why the chicken wasn’t the same before, and why it was different Saturday,” Nancy said. “This is the old recipe, what Frank used and everybody else used. It’s been here since Frannie left it. And Frank being Frank, my Frank, he would have thought it was funny to show a little kid and never show me. He never would have thought anything might happen to him. He thought he’d live forever.”

  Then it was here all along. Amanda stared at the paper in her hand. “So you just made Mimi’s chicken? Didn’t you think someone would notice?”

  “I thought the recipe was Frannie’s. I didn’t look at the back until we were done, and by then—no. I didn’t. At a certain point, isn’t fried chicken just fried chicken? I’ve been messing with it for years, and Tony Russell is the only one who said anything.” She sighed. “They’re not really here to pick the best chicken. They’re here to pick us apart, and I should have seen that from the beginning. Instead—I played right into their hands, and I’m sorry.”

  Gus looked from one of them to the other, his excitement fading. “But we can still show this to Sabrina, right? And Aunt Mae. And everybody. Because Sabrina asked everyone about this, Mom, and no one believed her, but—this just proves it.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” Amanda said, and she laid down the page on the counter again, more gently this time, and put a finger on the final line. Owe Mimi $1,400, October 29, 1889.

  Gus spoke. “Do you think Frannie ever paid Mimi back?”

  “I don’t think so,” Amanda said. “I think—that’s where this all started.”

  Mimi had shared her recipe—probably the family recipe; after all, they were sisters—and they’d just coexisted, here in town, two chicken places with plenty of trains bringing in plenty of customers, and the coal mine, and the mill. There had been no ill will. The whole feuding-sisters story . . . it wasn’t true.

  Until something went wrong, and Frannie was gone, and there wasn’t anyone left to care about Mimi. Had she asked the man she had so criticized to make it right, or had she been too proud? She, too, had died young, and for generations, Frannie’s grew, and Mimi’s struggled, first under Mimi’s daughters, the old ladies of Amanda’s very early childhood, and then Barbara’s grandmother, and her mother, and then Barbara, all bitter, always at least a little behind on everything, always mistrusting the bank and Merinac. When Amanda was little, when Barbara first took over Mimi’s, the Pogociellos had run this town.

  Nancy had seen this. Seen it before anything had really gone wrong, before the chicken tasting, before Mae accused her of stealing, before Amanda had told about Barbara, before the whole scene at the house.

  Before any of it. Nancy knew—and didn’t tell her. Didn’t tell anyone.

  “I wish I had said something,” Nancy said. “I think you know how much I wish I had said something the minute I turned over that paper. But I wanted to believe it couldn’t be true. That they paid it back, that all the rest of this whole feud was just Mimi’s. Your mother, holding a grudge.” She took a deep breath. “But I think you’re right. And the truth is that Frank—my Frank, your Frank—they must have known. Or guessed.”

  Amanda started to speak, then swallowed her question. Nancy felt bad enough already. Sometimes people let you down—and sometimes you let yourself down. Instead, she reached out and put one arm around her mother-in-law and beckoned Gus in with the other. He looked at them both uncertainly.

  “You think Grandpa—and Dad—I mean, that’s not that much money now, but it was. You really think that all along they knew Frannie’s started with Mimi’s help, and they just never said anything?”

  Nancy looked somber. “I don’t want to believe it, but I do.”

  “We’ll never know what they knew,” Amanda said gently. “But the one thing we can say for sure is that nobody is coming out of this whole Food Wars thing looking all that great.” Except Mae, she thought, and then she remembered the look on her sister’s face when she’d seen Jay standing there in Barbara’s front yard, watching them battle it out on the porch. She gathered Gus and Nancy in a tight hug, then turned to Gus. “Except you, kiddo. You’re the only one without any secrets.”

  Gus started to say something, but Nancy interrupted. “Well, I’m done with this one,” she said. She picked up the recipe and handed to Amanda. “This is yours. It’s up to you to decide what to do with it.”

  MAE

  You can’t clean out an entire house in a single day, especially when half the people involved have to go to work in the afternoon. To get around that, Sabrina had Mae focus on just the living room, what Mae and her mother had always called the back room, where the puppies had been born and where viewers would expect the fix to happen. While the emptying and cleaning of the rest of the house went on around them, Mae scraped together enough decent furniture to decorate, even staggering down the street holding one corner of a sofa from the Inn’s coffee shop while Jay, Kenneth, and Patrick held the others, in a surreal moment that the younger versions of Kenneth and Mae must have been laughing at, cigarettes and beer in hand, from some vantage point just out of sight. They’d return the sofa later, of course, but Barbara’s sofa wasn’t salvageable, and Sabrina planned to Facebook Live the makeover of the room right then, that afternoon.

  At Sabrina’s direction, Mae gathered everything she would need, right down to the smaller details, and essentially put together the room on the lawn. Then she went in, stood in the center of the now-empty room, camera angle carefully set to avoid any of the still-remaining mess, and started directing as Frankie, Kenneth, and Andy brought things in to set up and Jay helped Jessa load Madison and Ryder into the car to head back to the motel for a swim and a nap. Mae described to the Facebook audience why things went where and how she thought Barbara, Aida, and Patches and her puppies would use the room.

  “This is not some kind of designer room, obviously,” she told the camera, as she put fresh issues of People and Us Weekly for Aida on the coffee table and the remote control for the TV in a flat basket beside it, “but this is Barbara’s house, and Aida’s, and they should have what they want and love in here, not what I would want and love, or what you would want and love.” Pause, breathe. Good live television, like any good media, meant ending your sentences, letting the viewer take them in. “That means setting up the room for what really happens—the puppies play and get trained and socialized over here, where there’s no carpet and we’ve got rubber mats under all the newspaper, and then my mom and great-aunt Aida do their living here, and there’s room for guests to sit, and easy ways to clean up after the puppies. One reason my mom wasn’t doing that very well before is that it was hard for her to manage her household—but now everything is at hand.”

  She smiled. This was the big ending, the part she’d been drafting in her head since she found out Sabrina wanted to do this segment. She’d learned from Lolly and Sparkling that hitting the close right was important, and there was something she wanted to say. Sabrina gestured—okay, right, move to the sofa, sit down, add a little visual interest. Mae did, then spoke.

  “There are obviously other reasons my mom has trouble cleaning up after the puppies, and everything else,” Mae said. “She’s working on those. The spaces around us reflect the spaces inside us, and when those things don’t go together, that’s how we know we need to make a change. For my mom, she’s found that as she ge
ts older, she sees what’s really important in life, and now she wants her house to feel that way too. That’s going to help her make this happen.”

  Mae leaned forward and looked straight into the camera, imagining Jay on the other side. “Helping my mom clean up—and coming back to Mimi’s and my hometown—have kind of done the same for me. If you’ve seen my book at all, you know I have a saying: clean space, calm mind. I guess I always figured that if I had clear counters, a clear mind would just naturally follow—and it didn’t. Just like my mom needs to get her outer world in order, I need to be working on that inner stuff. Coming home is helping me figure out which few things are important, and I need to start making sure my life reflects that same simplicity and clarity I love to create in the spaces around me.”

  Final punch line. Mae glanced up at Sabrina, making sure she knew there was just a little more to come, and saw her nod. “So if you’ve been looking at my mom’s space and feeling like you’ve got it all together, maybe take a minute to think about whether the rest of your life has that same feel. And if your physical world is a little—or a lot—messier than you’d like, then maybe you’re coming at it from the other direction and getting your inside in order before you tackle the outside. Clean spaces, calm minds—they’re a journey, not a destination. And wherever you are on your journey, I hope watching us build a better space for my mom and my great-aunt and for Patches and the puppies to continue theirs inspires you to work on your own spaces—inside and out.”

  That was it. She sat, smiling pleasantly, letting Sabrina cut it off, until she was sure the cameras had stopped. “Good?” she asked Sabrina, still holding her position.

  “Perfect. We’re done. Getting a little deep there, for Food Wars, but I loved it. We’ll keep filming the rest, of course, and you need to do a reveal with Barbara, but this will be good stuff for the episode, too.”

  With Sabrina satisfied for the moment, Mae set out to find Jay. She needed to talk to him, but would he hear what she had to say? There was no time to linger and plan if she wanted to seize this moment when the cameras were focused on other things. She got up, then headed for the back patio. Andy, Kenneth, and Frankie were there, with Jay, who was putting his phone back in his pocket.

  “You were good, Aunt Mae,” said Frankie, a little begrudgingly.

  “Your mom and I will work things out, Frankie,” Mae said. Amanda had made Mae so angry, yes, but Amanda didn’t know yet about Barbara’s illness, or that as much as it mattered who came out on top in Food Wars, there were things that mattered more. She took Jay’s arm, meeting his eyes, asking permission, and he turned to follow her. “Sorry, guys, but Jay and I need to talk.”

  Quickly, she led him out the back trail, the one that went down to the river and the old cottonwood tree, rushing into speech as soon as they were out of earshot. “I’m sorry. I know, I need to explain, and I couldn’t, not with them filming everything. Thank you for going along with it. Seriously. Thank you.”

  Jay, beside her, was silent for a moment, and she loosened her grip on his arm, slid her hand down to his, willing him to take it, trying to push aside her fear that he was already halfway out the door, and the instinct to protect herself from how much it would hurt if he went. He did, and she squeezed, glad to have even the chance to tell him what she was thinking.

  “You could start with why we’re not in a Kansas City suburb,” Jay said, giving her a sideways glance. “A very small town an hour away is not exactly a suburb.”

  Mae bit her lip and felt herself flush. “Well, this is it,” she said. “This is home. It was hard, coming from this to New York. Or even from this to SMU. Everyone else knew what to say, and how to act, and what to wear. I had to learn to fake it. By the time we met, I had my story down. It was easier just to keep it that way.”

  “It didn’t matter where you were from, Mae. It never would have mattered.”

  They had reached the path down to the fallen tree now, and Mae stopped and faced Jay at the top. “Maybe not, but it was easier to just stick with the script. I’d been telling people my mom ran a restaurant in a Kansas City suburb for a long time before I met you. In my head, all this—the chicken, my mom, the house—it felt like it was following me, all the time. It was bad enough just dealing with all the Kansas jokes—No, we’re not in Kansas anymore. I’ve only heard that a thousand times.”

  “So you lied,” Jay said. He was making his way down the path now and didn’t look back at her.

  “It wasn’t lying,” she said. “I put a good spin on things. I can see how it looks like lying. And I can see all this differently now, too. But I couldn’t then. And I’m sorry. I really am.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. I guess. And your mom— I can see why you don’t talk about that, although you could have, to me. My parents aren’t exactly perfect either.”

  Mae still saw a pretty big gap between her history and Jay’s, which was at least neat and clean and looked more normal from the outside, but he was right. They’d both had to be their own support as kids. She knew that, but she’d never seen how much it connected them until now.

  Jay went on. “So that’s it? Any other surprises? Besides our future as dog owners?” Mae cast a quick look at him, and he smiled. He was kidding about that, anyway, she could tell—probably about all of it—but there was something else she hadn’t told him. Sabrina hadn’t worked her stint as an exotic dancer into any questioning, but she had it. It might only be a matter of time. And she was proud of it, she reminded herself. Proud that she had found a way to support herself.

  That really didn’t make this any easier.

  Jay was watching her, wary now, his teasing expression fading. Couldn’t she just skip this and accept the olive branch he seemed ready to extend? Maybe later would be a better time—but no. Clear the counter, right? “I also might not have mentioned that I put myself through college working at a place called the Yellow Rose of Texas Gentlemen’s Club.”

  Jay’s eyes widened as the implication of the name soaked in. “Working?”

  “Onstage. Dancing.” Mae needed to get that clear. “Just dancing. Nothing else, not ever.” As she spoke, it all came back to her—the too-brightly lit dressing rooms, her own very neat costume bag, the other girls, some up for a little more than dancing, but most toeing the line, in it for the money, just like Mae.

  Jay stood, gazing at her. Mae didn’t even know what to expect. This was so long ago, before they even met, but it was— Well, if she wasn’t maybe a little embarrassed by it, it would be on her résumé. She smiled weakly. “It was a long time ago.”

  Half of Jay’s mouth turned up into a smile, and now she could see—he was trying not to laugh. For a minute, she felt a little pissed—she was telling him important things, here—but she got it, kind of. She smiled a little more herself, and then he laughed, and now they were both laughing.

  “That’s kind of hot, really,” he said finally. “I hope you, like, remember some things.”

  She punched his arm, then, feeling a little bolder, took his arm and pulled him the rest of the way down the trail. They’d reached the fallen tree, and Jay found a good place to sit on its trunk.

  “Amanda and I used to play down here,” Mae said, taking a seat beside him.

  “That would be back when you weren’t pushing each other across a big reality TV stage, I expect.”

  Mae sighed. “We got a little worked up. Okay, a lot worked up. It’s just—she did things, and I did things, and my mom really needs to win this. This part is bad. She owes money on a mortgage I didn’t know about. She probably has Parkinson’s. And”—Mae put her hands on her knees and stared straight down at the ground—“she’s worried about what comes next. For Mimi’s. For her. For me. She needs me, Jay. And I guess—I need her, and this place. That’s why I said that, about staying, and I’m not sure what I meant, exactly, but I can’t just run away. Again.”


  This was hard. Much harder than the rest of it, than the history. They’d felt close again, just a minute ago, and now she was probably throwing all that away, but this was also it—her clearing all those internal counters. She didn’t want to be keeping anything from him. No more secrets, no matter what it cost her.

  And it might cost her a lot. Jay was silent—too silent, not touching her—and she didn’t dare look at him. The old Mae would have told him that she didn’t care what he thought or what he wanted, even if she did. The old Mae would not have given him the power to hurt her that she was extending now. But that had never worked as well as she’d liked to pretend it had.

  “I miss you, Jay. I miss us, cheering each other on. And I really, really want us to find our way back to that, and I also want to give my mom the support she’s going to need, and I don’t know how to make it all work. I guess I don’t even know if you want to, at this point. What I want to do is—” She took a deep breath and risked a glance up at him, but he was staring at the ground under his feet. “I know you’ve been saying you want to quit so we can spend a year traveling, but I wondered . . . I thought we could spend a year here. Or more. Maybe we could travel too, once I know what my mom’s health will be like. But seriously, Jay, you could do everything you want to do here. Think, be with the kids, meditate, whatever. It’s just a different way of looking at it.” She gestured around, at the river, the fallen tree, the saplings already springing up to take its place. “It’s peaceful. With the trees. And the river. You’ve got room to, uh, hear the trees falling.”