The Chicken Sisters(41)

Nancy, still looking dubious, headed for the parking lot.

Sitting at the bar while Sabrina quizzed Mary Laura about her love life, off camera, Amanda felt deflated. Why couldn’t Nancy just enjoy this? She ought to know Amanda could poke her sister a little without it turning into a big deal, and it wasn’t like Mae hadn’t said plenty about Frank and Frannie’s over the years. Amanda shoved the thought of her arguably explosive revelation about Mae’s stripper past firmly out of her head. Frannie’s would win, it would all be over, and there would be no drama.

Amanda sighed and tuned back in to the conversation around her to find Mary Laura and Sabrina both looking at her quizzically.

“What’s up?” Mary Laura asked, “Did we not have an excellent time tonight? Are we still not having an excellent time?”

“Nothing. We did. We still are.” She pushed her glass toward Mary Laura, who filled it before gesturing toward Sabrina with the shaker.

Sabrina covered her glass and shook her head, and with a flourish, Mary Laura emptied the rest into Amanda’s glass. “Excellent,” Sabrina said. “What we need now is somewhere to continue the party, and someone to continue it with.”

Mary Laura laughed. “There’s nowhere to go around here,” she said. “Pull up a stool. We’re the only game in town, and normally we’d have closed an hour ago.”

Nowhere to go, and nobody to go with. Amanda sighed again. “As usual, I’ll be heading home to my buddy Ben and my buddy Jerry.” She took too big a sip of her drink, and then, for good measure, another. She was not driving.

“How about your buddy Andy?” Sabrina smiled and lifted her eyebrows suggestively. “He was asking about you tonight. Check your phone. Bet he texted you.”

Amanda dug in her bag, under the Frannie’s shirt she had already changed out of. Her phone was off, as per Nancy’s rules for Frannie’s staff and the Food Wars filming suggestions. She powered it on: a long pause, then, yes, a notification. A text, from a number she knew was Andy’s even though she had not yet given it a name.

Hey, bet you were great tonight.

As she read it, the telltale dots appeared. He was typing. Amanda felt a little surge of the same feeling that had lit her up last night when he brushed his hand up the back of her neck. He was typing. Right now. To her.

I’m still cleaning up. Almost done. If there were anywhere to go I’d ask you if you wanted to get a drink.

Sabrina was looking over her shoulder, and she read the last part out loud. “Come on, tell him you will. Tell him to come here.”

Mary Laura shook her head. “I cannot be a party to this,” she said, and then laughed at the look on Amanda’s face. “Kidding! Honestly, I promised my boyfriend I’d come home after we close, and I already haven’t. I think he has champagne. He thinks this Food Wars thing is really cool. But you know Andy can’t come here.”

“There has to be somewhere,” Sabrina said, and both Amanda and Mary Laura shook their heads.

“Nope,” Amanda said. “This is why teenagers here hang out in the QuikTrip parking lot. There truly isn’t anywhere to go unless you drive a pretty long ways.”

Sabrina hopped off her barstool. “Well, I left my notepad with all my stuff on it for tomorrow at Mimi’s anyway. So I have to go there. And there’s a parking lot there, too. You can channel your inner teenager. Tell him you’ll bring him a beer.”

Mary Laura took two Schlafly Summer Lagers from the fridge behind the bar and set them on the counter. “There. You’re all set.”

Amanda put her phone in her pocket. She knew she was getting bulldozed, but it was really just a little fun distraction—even if Mae and her mother would think it was a terrible idea. It was just the parking lot, it wasn’t like she was going in, and they were just texting. In fact, she wasn’t even doing that. She was just—going along for the ride. “I’m not telling him anything,” she said. She didn’t have to make a fool of herself. “No way. If he’s there, great. Otherwise, I’ve got two beers.”





MAE





Mae hoped to clean out Mimi’s to prepare for the second night’s filming, but she expected her mother to fight the removal of each and every bedraggled paper napkin. Instead, once the reunion with Madison and Ryder was over (a much warmer reunion than Barbara’s dry attitude had led Mae to fear; instead, she had found herself worrying over her mother’s willingness to take Ryder down the slide, which she had managed with surprising dexterity), Mae was standing in the tiny Mimi’s dining area, watching this strange woman—because this could not be her mother—direct Andy to pull everything out from behind the counter before Mae even had a chance to get a good look at what was there. They had fresh paint, they had a power washer, and they had a mission.

“Just drag it all out,” Barbara commanded. “I’ll look at what’s worth keeping while you start painting.” She knelt and began prying open a can of paint, and Mae, who was carefully taking the pictures off the walls, ran to stop her.

“No, Mom, not yet. We need to wipe everything down, tape off the windows. You don’t just paint over the dust.”

Barbara shrugged. “I thought we were in a hurry here,” she said, but she put down the paint and straightened up. “Fine. You do it your way, then.”