The Chicken Sisters(29)
The house, though, reverted to its previous state within a matter of months. Twice more, Barbara’s friends, and later Mae and Amanda, took the house all the way back down to the bones, and twice more it returned to chaos. Entropy happened fast on Barbara’s watch, and as Mae stood outside the house now, she understood that it had been a long time since anyone had tried to stop it. She had no intention of trying. Her only involvement with her mother’s house on this trip would be to prevent Food Wars from coming anywhere near the place.
From somewhere behind her she heard a car door slam, and she took off at a run, thinking it was Madison or Ryder. But when she reached the edge of the house, she saw taillights turning out of the parking lot. Amanda and Andy, then, leaving, faster than she would have expected. She’d have to find Amanda in the morning. Barbara too. Damn.
It was late, but Mae felt restless. Time to make things happen. She yanked out her phone and texted her sister as she walked. Didn’t want to interrupt you and Andy. Slick moves, chick. Meet me after your school drop-off. We need to make a plan.
The back door of Mimi’s hung open, and as she reached in to shut it, she felt the gloom wrap around her in a way that it had not when Andy, Angelique, and Zeus were bustling around. The whole place spoke to Mae of decay and despair, and always had, in spite of the bright yellow paint. The first Mimi had started it not out of a burning desire to share her family chicken recipe but out of desperation when money first got tight, and it never loosened up. In the picture that had always hung on the wall she looked pinched and worried, and she was no happier in a later picture with the two daughters who would become Mary Cat and Mary Margaret, the second Mimi, the old ladies of Mae’s childhood.
Enough Mimis, enough memories. Mae spun around, away from the picture, waving her arms to stir things up as she went. Clearly it was time for bed. It was a warm night, but Mae felt a familiar chill as she walked out the front door and let it shut behind her. There was a shitload of ghosts in here, and most of them weren’t even dead.
AMANDA
Amanda woke up to the sound of Frankie in her closet.
Her head was pounding. She’d slept poorly, which was typical, and her last memories were of a dream with Frank in it, dark hair freshly trimmed and wearing the khaki pants and button-down he wore to teach, frying chicken at Mimi’s and telling her to go back to Frannie’s, never once turning so that she could just see his face. What she wanted was Pickle, whose heavily panting presence was the lullaby that kept her sleeping. But Pickle was gone, and Amanda still wasn’t used to it.
Yesterday had not ended well, and everything she’d gone to sleep trying not to think about was still there today. Mae showing up in Merinac after Amanda had convinced herself that she wouldn’t, and then sending that text, summoning Amanda to the royal presence. Where the hell had Mae been that she’d been spying on Amanda without Amanda seeing her? What business was it of hers? Sabrina, who had been so nice but still left Amanda feeling a little like everyone felt sorry for her, and then the stupid impromptu haircut, which had attracted far too much attention last night at Frannie’s. Her kids and Nancy all said it looked good, but they were probably just trying to be nice. She put a hand to her hair, which felt shorn on the sides, and pulled angrily at the springy curls that at least remained on top. How fast could this grow back? She’d have to find a baseball cap. There was probably one in the closet. With Frankie.
“What do you want in there? At least let me find it for you.” Frankie in her tiny walk-in closet was a shortcut to catastrophe; she had no respect for Amanda’s system, with the handful of things she actually wore in the front on the right, winter clothes jammed into the front left, and the piles of things she needed to sort and maybe give away pushed up carefully under the older hanging stuff in back.
“I’m not looking for me,” Frankie said, and turned to dump an armful of hangers and unfolded items onto Amanda’s bed. Amanda winced. System destroyed, plus now all of this would be on the floor next to her bed for the next month or more.
“We have to figure out what you’re wearing today.” Frankie riffled through her choices. “This does not look good on you anymore; you need to either get a waist or get rid of it. This isn’t bad, but the pattern will look awful on a screen. This”—she threw a three-quarter-sleeve T-shirt with a crisscrossed neck in a bright blue at her mother—“this is pretty good. It’s a good color for you. Do you have any clean jeans that are decent?” She pulled out a pair from her pile. “There is really no way you can still wear these. Why don’t you go through here and get rid of the stuff you don’t want?”
Honestly, she sounded like Mae, and it had never been more horrifying. “I like those jeans,” Amanda protested.
“They make you look like you’re wearing a sack on each leg.” Frankie walked around to the side of Amanda’s bed and looked down at the pile of clothes on the floor. “Wear the ones you had on yesterday; they’re not awful. With sandals.”
“I’m not wearing sandals to work! And I can’t wear any of that, anyway. I’m wearing the Frannie’s shirt, and so are you.”
“You can wear this for the first part,” Frankie said. “Make it look like you’ve just come to work from the rest of your great life. And if there’s a part where you talk to the camera, you can ask to change. The Frannie’s shirt makes you look like you’ve been sick for a week. Your hair is awesome, at least. You can’t mess that up.”