The Chicken Sisters(24)
“Let’s talk about you, though. This is a real homecoming for you, right?”
Mae glanced around. They were going to do this here? Out behind the kitchen, before she had even seen her mother or spent any time in the restaurant? Mae tried to avoid looking around at the space that would be the backdrop for her first appearance in front of all these potential fans and followers, and turned her attention to Sabrina, keeping her shoulders open and addressing the camera trained on them both. “It is. I’m really excited to come home and do some work on the place.”
“Work?”
“Well, spruce it up a little.” She gestured to the nicer of the two weedy strips along the patio, hoping the camera would avoid the other, which featured cracked pots and dead plants, with nothing growing but a fork planted tines down in the dirt. Time to take the focus off their surroundings. “And I’ve been thinking about the menu,” she said, picking one up and hoping the camera would focus in. “It’s simple, but maybe it’s a little too simple.”
Behind her, Andy deposited plates of chicken, biscuits, salad, and fries in front of Madison and Ryder, looking up as he did. “How so?”
The camera swiveled, and Sabrina stepped back while Mae kicked herself. This wasn’t a conversation she meant to have with this guy, and certainly not now, on camera, when they’d just met. But then, he must be the one who persuaded her mother to up their game on the fries. Andy repeated his question, his tone challenging, but maybe interested as well. “How is it too simple?”
“I love what we serve, of course, Andy.” She reached down and took a fry from Ryder’s plate. He protested, but she ignored him, biting it appreciatively. “These are excellent.” Andy waited. Not flattered, then, judging from the look on his face. Who did he think he was, the guardian of Mimi’s? “But the menu’s been the same for a long time.” And I have been around for longer than you, dude. “I just thought it was something we could talk about—looking into some healthy, organic options. Maybe”—she glanced around, then focused on a little wooden bowl of simple iceberg salad—“mix some kale in with the lettuce. Something like that. We don’t need to talk about it now, of course.”
“Why not now?”
“Well, because my mother’s not here. It’s her call. I’m just thinking out loud.” She smiled, gracious and reasonable.
But Andy wasn’t buying it. He crossed his arms over his chest. “I know she wanted you here because you’ve done this whole reality thing before.” He gestured to the cameras. “But Barbara and I are pretty much on the same page in the kitchen, and that’s the same page Mimi’s always been on. We serve what we serve, and it’s all the best of its kind. We leave the messing around with mozzarella sticks to Frannie’s.”
Great. Clearly Andy saw her as some kind of threat, and one who knew nothing about Mimi’s and its business besides. This was ridiculous. She hadn’t really even been thinking about the menu, although there were things they could do—it would be nice to have a healthier option, for example. She’d just wanted to get the attention off her “homecoming.” Without meaning to, she crossed her own arms. “Not mozzarella sticks. And really, we should wait for my mother.”
“Sounds fine,” he said, turning away. “You know she’ll agree with me.”
Sabrina, still smiling brightly, stepped back up, and Mae glanced around her for a way to end this conversation before it began again. She leaned over and grabbed Ryder’s only remaining piece of chicken and bit into it enthusiastically. “That’s good, isn’t it?”
Ryder’s howls caused both Sabrina and her cameraperson to step away, and once they’d engaged with a customer, asking about the evening’s food, Mae slid a piece of chicken from Madison’s plate to Ryder’s, knowing her daughter cared far more about the fries. “I’m sorry, buddy. I was hungry. I should have asked, right?”
Ryder sniffled and nodded.
The chicken was good, at least. Even better than she remembered, and she took more of Madison’s generous serving. She had eaten next to nothing all day, and it had been years since she’d eaten a French fry, let alone fried chicken. Good fried chicken was remarkably hard to come by in New York, but this—tender, with just enough crust-only bits protruding, skin peeling easily away from the meat—this was good. The fries were thin and still hot, some with crunch, some with bite, lightly sprinkled with the salt blend they’d always used. The biscuits were fresh and flaky, and the salad’s iceberg lettuce was dressed with Mimi’s trademark sweet oil dressing—a closely guarded (but really very simple, and once very common) recipe. Delicious, all of it, if technically speaking a nutritional catastrophe.
Jay would like this, she thought absently. If he’d like anything to do with her right now. And if she were to bring Jay anywhere near this place, which she would not. Of all the things Jay was never going to taste, this chicken topped the list. This was a guy who thought the twenty-eight-dollar fried chicken plate at Blue Ribbon had a little touch of slumming it, especially when eaten at one A.M. after a night in the bars of the Lower East Side. She’d known from their first date that Jay would never get Mimi’s.
They’d attended a wedding once, of a college friend of his, in St. Louis. It had been a very nice wedding, actually, but Jay, the only nonwhite person in attendance, had been forthright in his East Coast condemnation of the entire city, the entire state, the entire region. Mae had joined in at the time, agreeing that she didn’t much miss “the suburbs of Kansas City,” where she had long since relocated Merinac when relating her precollege history, and internally renewing a vow of her own: Jay would never, ever set foot in her hometown. A few years wouldn’t have erased the small-mindedness that had always kept people here from dreaming big or doing anything with their lives. She was lucky. She got out. Jay didn’t ever need to know just how far she had come.