The Chicken Sisters(23)

Andy turned to Sabrina and her camera, grinning cheerfully. “Kid shit his pants,” he said, and Sabrina cast the dismayed look of the childless at Ryder while Mae nodded, cursing the choice to leave Jessa at the Travelodge. She would have paid any amount of money to hand Ryder off and greet Sabrina gracefully, setting a professional tone for the next few days.

“We just need to clean up a little,” Mae said. The camera turned to her, and she lowered her hands and tried to look as if this were just a little incident, instead of the full-blown stinker that was painfully obvious to everyone present. Ryder, though, had other plans. “We got to clean off the POOP,” he declared, and started to march himself into the kitchen.

Mae gave in and picked him up, holding him almost as though there was nothing wrong. “You got it,” she said, smiling pleasantly at the camera. She should laugh; she knew she should. Just another mom dealing with the mess. But Mae Moore didn’t do mess, and the probably forced-looking smile was all she could manage. “Y’all excuse us, okay?” Oh God. Y’all? What was she doing? She had to get away.

Andy pointed to Madison. “She better wait out here,” he said. “The office is small.”

“I know it’s small,” Mae started, her frustration with him and with the whole situation creeping into her voice again, and she thought she saw him grin. “Come on, Madison.” Anything to get away from Sabrina and the camera.

“Suit yourself, then,” he said. “Or I’ve got French fries.” He shook a few onto a plate and held them out to Madison, who looked up at her mother. Too annoyed to be grateful for the favor, she shrugged.

“Go ahead, honey,” she said. “Ryder and I will be a while.”

“I want fries!”

“I’ll save you some, Rydie,” said Madison, looking questioningly at Andy, who nodded. “You go with Mommy.”

Sabrina knelt down to Madison, and Mae had to let whatever exchange was going to happen, happen. Even Sabrina—and Mae had known her and known of her for years, and she wouldn’t put much past her—wouldn’t mess too much with a six-year-old without her parents around. Especially with the camera there, Mae couldn’t hold off on changing a minute longer. They did look like good French fries, she noticed. When she’d last worked in the kitchen, they’d been frozen, but those looked freshly cut. Barbara hadn’t mentioned hiring a cook, which was so unlike her that Mae could hardly wrap her head around it, but at least the guy seemed to have persuaded Barbara to make some changes.

Fifteen disgusting minutes later, Mae was ready for her Food Wars debut. In the kitchen another man, a smaller one, was teaching Madison to spray the dishes and slide them through the commercial dishwasher while Sabrina and her camera looked on, cooing admiration and encouragement. “Thank you, Zeus,” Madison said. “Mommy, look!”

Mae must have looked surprised, because the woman—young, pretty, cheerful—who was doing the serving behind the counter heard her, laughed, and introduced herself. Angelique, she said, and the dishwasher was Zeus. “He’s really Jesús,” she said, pronouncing it the Spanish way, “but the first cook he worked with called him Zeus, and it stuck.”

With a promise that his own French fries were coming, Mae set Ryder up at a picnic table just outside the restaurant door with a coloring sheet, where Mae and Amanda had spent their childhood summers, close to their mother but out of the way. Angelique produced cups of crayons, the cups slightly squished to fit through the slats of the picnic table, just as they always had, and Mae touched the table gently. Same table, exactly. Same smell of crayons in the waxy cup. Possibly even some of the same crayons.

But Sabrina’s presence left no time for nostalgia, even if Mae wanted to feel it. She came over quickly, trailed by Madison and the camera, and leaned over the coloring page as one of her young minions pushed a clipboard at Mae. “Your sister drew that, right, Mae?”

Sabrina knew who Mae was and that she was coming, too, then—and knew her history with Amanda and who knew what else. They were just going to jump right into things. Mae signed the release quickly, not reading it—they were all the same—then looked into the camera. “She did,” Mae said, carefully choosing her words. “Amanda’s always been a good artist.” She wasn’t expecting to talk about Amanda so soon, without a chance to see her sister first. What would Amanda have said about Mae? Had Sabrina talked to Barbara yet? Not for the first time, Mae cursed both the delay and her mother’s and sister’s unwillingness to strategize by text. They could keep the “war” focused on the chicken if everybody would just be smart about it, and they could be. They’d been a team once, she and Amanda, and, yeah, they’d had some rough years, but now was the time to put all that in the past and focus. Damn it, if only she knew what Amanda or Barbara had said.

“It’s funny that you still use that drawing, though,” Sabrina said.

Mae could feel Sabrina pushing slightly, laying her bait. She smiled internally—she was not that easy, and Sabrina ought to know it. “Not really. She painted the sign outside, too.” Amanda’s chickens belonged at Mimi’s. It was hard to imagine one at Frannie’s, although maybe she drew them there, too. Mae looked again at the familiar chicken. Of course. Frannie’s probably had an Amanda-designed coloring page too. She’d just never thought of it before, and she had that feeling you get when you see a friend you’d thought of as unchanging suddenly living a new life. It took her a moment to tune back in to Sabrina.