The Chicken Sisters(18)
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“Perfect,” Sabrina said as she looked around the tiny windowless office Amanda shared with Nancy. She hopped up on the desk Amanda used for payroll and the occasional late-night drawing session and sat, her perfect legs dangling. “Amanda, honey, grab that chair and take a seat.” She turned to the cameraman. “Gordo, want to get set up? Use Amanda for target practice, see how the lighting is, et cetera?”
Amanda pulled the old armchair out of the corner into the spot Gordo indicated and settled into it while he fussed about her, first setting up his tripod and a camera, then pulling lights from a big bag and moving them around, then going back to peer at his screen. She tried to relax. He was just setting up, after all. There was nothing to worry about. She leaned back and crossed her legs, watching him move around the room, and tried to think of something to say that didn’t sound totally dorky.
She failed. “I can’t believe you picked us.” She couldn’t, either. Couldn’t believe that she was here, in their office, hanging out with Sabrina Skelly. “You must get so many e-mails. We’re so excited—I mean, it’s just so cool that you’re here.”
“You’d probably be surprised how few we get,” Sabrina said. “Most people don’t have the balls to actually go after what they want. They talk about it, and they think about it, but they don’t often make it happen.”
Amanda touched her hair, pleased. It was pretty rare for anyone to tell her she had balls, even indirectly.
“So that’s really your son out there? You must have been a baby when you had him. You can’t be more than thirty now.” Sabrina’s tone was casual, even if the question felt a little sudden. Gordo was still fussing around with lights and cords, paying them little attention. She must just be used to asking personal questions—and most people asked this eventually. Might as well get it out of the way.
“I’m thirty-five, actually.” Thirty-five with a baby face, although at least they’d finally stopped carding her at liquor stores a few years ago. “I was nineteen when Gus was born.”
Sabrina looked thoughtfully at her. “Oops?”
Amanda laughed. “Not really.” She hated it when people assumed that. No, she hadn’t exactly planned to get pregnant, but she hadn’t had better plans, either, and Frank had loved the idea of starting a family young. That was another thing Mae had never understood—that not everybody needed to control everything. Sometimes you rolled with what came. But she didn’t want Sabrina to think she was some sort of hayseed, or even that she had been at eighteen. “Start young, and you end up like me—two great kids who can mostly take care of themselves, and you’re not too old to enjoy it.”
“Exactly! You can do anything now, right? What’s the plan? More Frannie’s? Your mother-in-law seems great.”
“Oh, she really is,” Amanda said, and then stopped. More Frannie’s was the plan, as far as she’d made one. But that sounded so—in Mae’s old word—lame. She couldn’t really tell the glamorous Sabrina that she just wanted things back the way they had always been. She was happy to talk about Nancy, though. “She loves us—all of us, I mean, everybody who works here. She always wanted a big family, but she just had Frank, so we’re all kind of her family.”
Amanda remembered Nancy’s joy when Frankie was on the way, her hope that Amanda and Frank would go on to have many more; she’d confided that Frank being an only child was not at all what she’d planned. But this was a little too close to Nancy’s heart, here. “What about you, do you have kids?” Thanks to Wikipedia, she knew the answer, but it seemed weird to admit it.
“God no. This is scarcely the lifestyle for it, and I’m not really cut out for looking after other people. Except my crew, right, Gordo?” Gordo, making adjustments to a tripod in the corner, grunted. He was creating an extraordinarily elaborate setup, with a phone on a small tripod hanging beneath the bigger camera and lights everywhere that he began to turn off and on. Sabrina turned back to Amanda. “So you guys will win this thing, then settle in and make Frannie’s great? Spend the rest of your life here, bring the kids into the business?”
From her tone, Amanda didn’t think Sabrina was impressed. “Well . . .”
“Well? That sounds a little hesitant. Is there maybe more to Amanda Pogociello than fried chicken and the wide-open spaces of the prairie? My parents run a car dealership, and I like cars, but . . .”
Amanda laughed. “Of course there’s more. I love Frannie’s, and I love what I do here, so that really is the plan. But I do other things—” Should she tell Sabrina this? The other woman had moved closer, her face warm and interested. And it was just a hobby, really, not something that would ever get in the way of Frannie’s. “I like to draw.” That sounded so small, I like to draw, and now Amanda felt like she was being disloyal to the thing that filled so much of her free time—sometimes encroaching on time that wasn’t technically free—to the huge canvases that she painted on over and over because she couldn’t afford new ones, to the sketchbooks that served as her diaries, even to the chicken characters that had taken on a life of their own this past year. Those were easiest to describe. “I make these—comic books, I guess you’d call them. Graphic comic books. Not funny, mostly. About chickens.”