The Chicken Sisters(17)

Couldn’t that be enough? Of course not. Sabrina was looking at her, waiting for more. “We fell in love. In high school. And then—” Oh, this was awkward. She fell silent, and Mary Laura leapt in instead.

“Of course we all knew Frank had a big crush on Amanda,” she said. “It was like Romeo and Juliet, only with fried chicken.” That got her a laugh and took the pressure off Amanda too, but Mary Laura never knew when to stop. “It was a little weird,” she added cheerfully. “We thought they must be related, kinda, but I guess those relatives lived a really long time ago.”

“Frank and Amanda were perfect together,” Nancy said, giving her staffer a slight glare. “I was delighted when they began dating. Amanda was—is—a lovely girl.”

Oh God. Amanda stared down at her cookie, willing them not to go any farther down this road. Nancy might have been delighted, or at least willing to pretend to be, but her mother and Mae had not been. Mae had been trying to drag Amanda down her own path, off to college, working her way through by doing every dirty but well-paid job imaginable, from cleaning crime scenes to exotic dancing. Mae had only laughed when Amanda started dating Frank (she’d pronounced it the “lamest rebellion ever”), but once they decided to get married, Mae’s tolerance had been replaced by horror that Amanda planned to throw her life away on fried chicken and Frank, and she had said so, loudly and often, while offering to pay for the abortion she knew perfectly well Amanda never intended to have and demanding to know how the sister she’d seen to it was thoroughly educated in every aspect of birth control could possibly have gotten herself into this mess.

Her mother’s reaction had been quieter but worse. She’d said hardly anything about the wedding, hardly anything about Frank, even, but then, she never said much. Everything that mattered in the Moore household went unspoken, and this turned out to be just another case where no one had told Amanda the rules Mae seemed to have been born knowing. Driving home after a short honeymoon in St. Louis, Amanda needed to pee desperately. In those days, there was no inn on Main Street, no coffee shop, no craft store. She told Frank to pull in at Mimi’s.

“You sure?”

Amanda didn’t even see why he was asking. Why would they not?

Barbara came out as the car stopped, and Amanda tried to rush around her. Peeing was far more urgent than a hug. But Barbara stepped in front of her and gently barred the way. “No.”

“What do you mean, no?” Amanda could still remember her younger self’s confusion.

“I mean no. You belong to Frannie’s now, Amanda. You’re a Pogociello. That means you stay out here on the porch.”

Amanda had been shocked enough to stop in her tracks. “You can’t mean that.”

“It’s not me, Amanda. You know the way this works. You’ve always known. Did you really think you could have both?” She must have been able to tell from Amanda’s expression that that was exactly what Amanda had thought. “If you’re part of Frannie’s, you can’t come into Mimi’s.” She steered her daughter away from the door, but Amanda tried again to push past her. “Mom! I just have to go to the bathroom. Come on, this is ridiculous.”

Barbara didn’t move, and after a stunned moment, Amanda turned away. Barbara stood in the doorway, watching, while Amanda got back into Frank’s car.

“We could run into the hardware store, probably,” Frank muttered.

Amanda sat down heavily in the seat, her legs still out the door, staring back at Mimi’s. “She wouldn’t let me in,” she said.

“Well, no,” he said. “Of course she wouldn’t.” He looked at her, and she realized that she had disappointed him somehow. He stared down at the steering wheel. “You thought she would?”

Without another word, Frank drove them to his parents’ house, where Amanda rushed to the bathroom, and he sat in the car for a while before he came inside. She knew now, although she had not been able to see it then, that realizing she didn’t understand the consequences of their marriage made Frank doubt her from the very beginning. She had taken the story he’d been imagining, of her giving up everything for him, and turned it into a tale of supreme youthful cluelessness.

She had never told him so, but she would have married him anyway. At nineteen, she’d craved everything he offered: love, security, faith, a predictable future. But who the hell knew what they really wanted at nineteen? At least she had dumb-lucked herself into something pretty good, she thought, looking around at the cozy crowd of friends and family, at Nancy, calmer now and beaming at her across the table. Her sister and her mother were her history. This was her present.

“Romeo and Juliet,” said Sabrina, smiling at her. “It sounds like a wonderful romance. And now you’re part of this.” She gestured around her, and Amanda nodded.

“This is my family now,” she said, thinking of Frank but speaking to Nancy, “and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

There was a small collective “awww,” and everyone smiled at an embarrassed Amanda until Sabrina broke things up with a shift in her tone and body language that made it clear that she had been playing to the camera before.

“We do want to set up somewhere for those offstage interviews,” she said. “Amanda, is there an office or something? It’s better for the sound if it’s in a small room, if there is one. We can even clean out a closet.”