The Chicken Sisters(28)
“I told you not to open that door. I told you, while I’m gone, don’t you open that door to anybody. Not anybody, no matter what they say.”
Mae thought she just wasn’t supposed to let anybody in, but she didn’t argue. Barbara turned and walked back out the door. She spoke over her shoulder as Mary Cat took a glass from the sink, rinsed it out, and opened the refrigerator, ignoring them all.
“Get your shoes. Get in the car.”
Mae and Amanda, confused, didn’t move.
“I’m not leaving you here again. Now!”
They drove straight to the big house where her mother’s best friend lived, and Barbara went in, leaving them in the car. After a while, Barbara and Patti came out and they all drove home together; Patti held the girls’ hands as they followed their mother into the house. Mae got her sister a coloring book, but Amanda didn’t open it, just held it tight. Instead, they watched as Barbara and Patti, and then more grown-ups, filled boxes and bags and carried them out, then came in and did it again and again. Amanda’s head rested heavy on Mae’s shoulder before falling into her lap, and Mae laid her own head down on her sister, just for a minute, while she tried to figure out what was going on.
When she woke, the room was so empty that she didn’t recognize it. There was the sofa, the big chair beside it, and in front of them both a glass-topped table Mae barely remembered, with two magazines carefully stacked on it next to an empty ashtray. There was a round rug over the worn carpet, and a set of glass shelves against the wall holding nothing but the television and two bookends shaped like monkeys with their hands over their mouths or eyes. The whole thing gleamed, from the mirrored silvery supports to the sparkling clear shelves.
It was the most beautiful thing Mae had ever seen. Mae got up and walked over to the shelves, putting her head under and staring up through the glass. It was so clear she could see straight up, and she lay down in the center of the room and spread her arms and legs wide, making a snow angel in the rug, then rolled all the way to one side, then the other, basking in the space to move. She had never even known how much she wanted this until now.
Did the rest of the house look this way? She heard voices in the kitchen and followed them, walking quietly with tiny steps through the neat room.
Patti was standing on a chair, wiping out a cabinet. Her mother stood beneath her, a Smurfs glass in each hand, ready to hand them up. The kitchen was as clean as the living room. Mae wanted to eat at that clean counter, drink from that Smurfs glass, stay in this kitchen forever.
“Can I have some cereal?”
Her mother turned, and one of the glasses—the best one, the one with Smurfette—slipped from her hand and shattered. Her mother stared down at the mess, and Mae froze as Barbara lifted the other glass above her head and dropped it. Glass flew even farther.
“Barbara . . .” Patti climbed carefully down from the chair. She had on shoes. Barbara was in her stocking feet and Mae, barefoot. “Don’t move, Mae, honey. Not one step.”
Amanda, also barefoot, appeared in the door, and Patti picked her up and swung her up on a counter, then lifted Mae up next to her. “I’ll get a broom.”
Barbara didn’t move her feet, but she put her hands on her hips and looked right at Mae.
“You let a world of trouble in here last night,” she said. “Gary Logan wants nothing but money, and that friend of his, that Frank Pogociello, he’ll steal this house right out from under us if he can. We can’t give them any excuse to go snooping around, you hear me? If they think I can’t manage, and bring in social, they’ll take you two away. Is that what you want? Is it? Because that’s what you did, when you let him in.”
Patti ran back in without the broom.
“They don’t know, Barbara. Stop.”
Mae stared at her mother, trying to understand. Barbara walked right through the glass and put her hand under Mae’s chin, talking straight into her face. “Now it’s clean, and it will stay that way, but if you tell anyone it wasn’t, or that I left you alone here, that gives them a way in, do you see? People think a woman alone can’t do anything, and just because we don’t have money, because I need to work and I can’t be spending all my time making it pretty around here, they think they can run right over me and get what they want, and what they want is to get us out of here, pave this place over, turn it into a parking lot or something. And we are not going to let that happen.”
Mae nodded, and Patti said, “Barbara. You’re scaring her. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
“I told you what Mary Cat said,” said Barbara. “If they make that mortgage due—”
“They won’t. There’s no reason to.”
“They could take it all away, Patti. And we—the girls and me—”
Mae was scared. Who would take what away? What had she done?
“It’s okay, Mae,” said Patti, but Mae didn’t believe her. She didn’t believe anyone but her mother, and her mother did not look okay.
Mae crawled over the counter and off on the other side, away from the broken glass.
She picked up the broom and took the dustpan in her other hand. “I can make it pretty, Mama,” she offered. “While you work.”
It took years for Mae to realize that she could not keep that promise no matter how hard she tried. Her father had never returned, at least as far as she knew. “Dead of his drinking, and good riddance,” her mother said a few years later, when she asked, and Mae couldn’t find the energy to care. Frank Pogociello came around a few more times, knocking, and even left papers taped to the door, which were the only things Mae ever saw her mother manage to throw away.