The Chicken Sisters(33)

Mae whacked her on the arm. “Haven’t you watched? What about the one where the guy is adopted, and he just wants his dad to be proud of him making the cheesesteaks, and the dad has never said it and then he does and they both cry at the end? Or the one where the husband and wife fight over where they get the lobster and it turns out that it’s her ex’s boat?”

Amanda had seen the cheesesteak one, yes, but she thought that stuff just happened. If you did enough Food Wars, probably some people were bound to have emotional things going on. And it was a nice story, at least. “Right, but they’re not looking for it. And they want their viewers to, like, feel good.”

“Good that their wife isn’t maybe still sleeping with her ex, yeah. I think that couple got a divorce.”

Why did Mae have to act like she knew so much more about everything than Amanda? She might have been on TV a few times, but Food Wars was different, and this was Merinac, not New York. “There’s nothing like that going on here. You’re making this too big a deal, Mae.”

“You don’t think they’d be happy to run with you flirting with Andy? Because I guarantee they would. And, seriously, Amanda? One chicken guy wasn’t enough?”

Amanda’s face got hot. She’d forgotten that Mae had seen her last night. And she wasn’t flirting, anyway. Andy wasn’t even her type. She didn’t have a type. She had a fourteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old. “I wasn’t flirting. I was looking for you. And where were you, anyway?”

“Walking back from Mom’s, and I didn’t want to interrupt you. But maybe I should have, if you can’t figure out for yourself that the guy’s a real dead end.”

She didn’t say, Another dead end, but Amanda knew she was thinking it.

“Goddamn it, Mae,” she began, intending to respond to that slap about Frank. Amanda wasn’t interested in Andy at all, she’d tell Mae that, and that it was pointless trying to do anything with Mimi’s besides just make it through the weekend. But before Amanda could even decide how her sentence would end, they came to the bend in the path where the railroad track grading ended and you made your way down to the water. The big cottonwood that grew on the bank should be looming over them, its upright trunk just coming into view, the tree they’d climbed as kids, sat under, carved their names into.

Instead, they saw a ripped stump. The tree itself lay across the bank and out into the water, a fallen giant, limbs stretched up to the sky.

“Oh no.” Amanda put her hands over her mouth and stopped.

Mae, in front of her, put a hand down on the bank to help herself down the steep slope. “Our tree! It’s—how long has it been down?”

Amanda shook her head. “I don’t know. Mom didn’t tell me—I don’t know if she knew.” She felt more upset than she should have. The tree was old, and cottonwoods came down all the time; Amanda and Mae knew that better than most. It was one of the reasons people didn’t plant them in their yards anymore. But this had been their cottonwood. Her cottonwood. She had drawn it a hundred times, leaned on it, measured her height by its limbs. Somehow she’d thought it would last forever. From the look on Mae’s face, her sister must have felt the same way. Amanda made her way down next to Mae. The way the tree had fallen had erased the names they’d once carved into it, and the stump, while jagged, looked worn. She should have known something was wrong while they walked—the shade was gone, leaving the familiar path fully exposed. “It must have been a while ago. You’d think she’d have heard it, though.”

Mae had turned her back on the tree, and on Amanda, and was staring out at the river. “Trees fall,” she said. “If there wasn’t anyone here to hear it, maybe it didn’t make a noise.”

Amanda knew her sister was just trying to lighten the mood, but the comment set something off inside her. “Of course it did,” she said, and to her surprise, she was crying. “Of course it made a fucking noise, Mae. It was a big tree. It fell. It made just as big a noise as you can imagine.”

Mae started to turn, probably to tell Amanda that she was only kidding, but Amanda had had enough of Mae’s jokes, and of Mae, and of everything. She turned around without saying another word to her sister, hitched up the tote bag that was slipping off her shoulder, and left. She didn’t need Mae’s help, or her sympathy, or her plan.

She needed to go home.





MAE





Amanda was such a drama queen. Mae followed her up the slope, well aware that her sister wouldn’t stop until she got wherever she was going, and that wherever that was didn’t involve Mae. It was a tree, and, yeah, it was sad, but it was ancient history. Things changed, just like they’d changed between her and Amanda. Mae had hoped, with a shared mission, that they could at least slip back into their old ways a little. Weren’t they on the same side? Of course, that’s not the way Food Wars would see it, but in reality. The Merinac side, the make-this-a-huge-success side. Why wouldn’t her sister even listen to her? It would be so much better for everyone if they worked together behind the scenes, at least a little, but no. Amanda had to be stubborn.

Mae squared her shoulders as she walked through the backyard, avoiding even so much as a glance at the house. She’d heard the door slam just before she came up the ridge, and now she could just see her mother disappearing in front of Mimi’s. On to the rest of the day. Step one: chase Barbara down. Mae sped up slightly. Step two: figure out how far Barbara would let her go in getting Mimi’s increasingly more camera-ready before each Food Wars appearance. Sadly, burn it down and start over was not a practical option, but scrape the counter area and the patio back to walls and concrete was, and Mae intended to persuade Barbara to let that happen.