The Chicken Sisters(37)
Barbara rubbed the dog’s head. “A little after they moved up here, when they were redoing the place, Patrick asked if I could teach him to bake pies like mine, so I did. He’s very good at it now.”
Mae tried to imagine Barbara and Patrick, side by side, matching rolling pins in their hands. Mae and Amanda were customers of their mother’s pies, just as dependent on her whims as anyone else. Mae dreamed about her mother’s chocolate cream, Amanda loved apple, they would both take a slice of lemon meringue, but Mae hardly dared to request a flavor, let alone a baking lesson. Pies were Barbara’s department, and she accepted no help.
Well, damn. Maybe Patrick would teach her. If nothing else, it would make a hell of an Instagram post. Which reminded her—she stopped to point her camera phone down into the white bakery bag. The muffins inside glowed, lit by the bright sunlight. Breakfast in my hometown, she typed with a practiced thumb, #yum. She used her keyboard shortcut to add one of her strings of set Food Wars hashtags: #FoodWars #hometowngirl #midwesteats #foodtrip #bestfriedchicken #worththecalories.
“Good, then,” she said, ready to move on, her mind halfway to Mimi’s already. What if they started outside? Replant the planters, power wash the patio, her mother couldn’t mind any of that, and then Mae would carefully, delicately approach the counter and the rest. “We’ll have even more pies tonight. Sounds like we’re going to need them.” She reshared Patrick’s clever Facebook post of the pie special, text over what must have been an image of pies on the Inn’s counter, then took a muffin for herself. All this talk of pie was making her hungry.
“We’ll see.” Her mother stopped, still out of sight of the park, and sat down heavily on the bench outside the craft store, which had not yet opened for the day. The dog sat too, then flopped down as though her bulk was just too much to hold up. Barbara looked at Mae, her friendly expression replaced by one of cautious interest.
“Now, before we go any further, tell me exactly what you have planned, because I know there’s something.” Unexpectedly, Mae heard an echo of Jay in her mother’s words, with the same resignation, and it annoyed her. She made good plans. People just needed to give them a chance instead of getting so caught up in doing things their way.
“It’s only minor details,” she protested. “We can just get started. And I know you want to see the kids.” Her mother was not a small-children person, but still.
“Mmm-hmm,” said Barbara. “I saw them at Christmas, in New York, where they were far more interested in presents and their babysitter than me. Today they will be more excited by the muffins, which is fine. Saturday I’ll fry them doughnuts and be the greatest thing ever for about ten minutes. Now, let’s hear it.” She patted the bench beside her. “I’ve had my coffee. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
AMANDA
Ordinarily, Amanda hated going home to her empty house while the kids were at school. If she wasn’t working the lunch shift, she went anywhere else: Patrick and Kenneth’s, Nancy’s, Walmart. She volunteered, becoming the de facto art teacher for the elementary school, where the teacher provided by the district (who also taught at the middle and high schools) could only get there once a week. She took her sketchbooks and sat on benches and at picnic tables when the weather was warm. Anything to avoid the mess, which never reached Barbara level but still made her feel defeated inside. And the silence. Mostly the silence.
But after seeing Mae, she couldn’t go anywhere but home. The tears that had overwhelmed her when she saw their fallen tree were threatening to become an all-day affair, and she needed the privacy of her tiny house to pull herself back from the sense that it wasn’t just the tree that was being torn from its roots.
Mae was so totally not cleaning her fucking kitchen. The last time Amanda saw Mae was here, in her little kitchen, two days after Frank’s funeral. Mae was already packed, already heading home, basically gone, but she stopped in for one last assault on Amanda’s entire life. Sitting at the kitchen table, organizing sympathy cards into neat rows, asking—no, demanding—to know what Amanda’s plan was now. “Action is the best cure for anxiety,” Mae declared, hopping up to straighten Amanda’s counters. In her mind, Amanda, in a burst of fury, had swept everything, cards, blender, toaster, coffee cups, off every surface, raging at her sister that this wasn’t anxiety, it was horror, it was a shit show, it was the impossible meeting the unbearable and crashing into the unthinkable and Mae had no idea, none . . .
In reality she’d done no such thing. She’d sat and stared down at the linoleum and muttered something, wanting Mae to leave or at least to stop acting like Amanda’s grief was some sort of offense against Mae herself.
Mae had knelt in front of her, pregnant belly dangling, and grabbed both of Amanda’s hands. “Come to New York,” she said. “We’ll find a place out of the city, where we can afford it, you and me and Jay, with the kids, find you work, get you back into school—help you start again. I know this is terrible, but you’ll get through it. You just need a plan.”
Amanda shook her head. Frankie, then barely eight, wandered into the kitchen, and Mae reached out and pulled her over. “Frankie, you want to come live with Auntie Mae, right? And Mommy?”
Frankie, still a little bashful, leaned into Amanda and didn’t say anything. Amanda held her daughter close, pressing the little head into her own chest and glaring at Mae. “You don’t just do that,” she said. “Just—no. Don’t ask the kids stuff like that. We can’t— We’re fine, Mae. Fine without you.”