The Chicken Sisters(56)

You don’t even get what Mimi’s is all about, or what it means to carry on a tradition, she silently told her sister. Mae might have left, but she hadn’t forgotten what was important.

Or how to get along in this town. Mae plunged her hands angrily into another chicken. Mae was doing just fine here, at least temporarily. John Calvin and Amanda aside, nobody around here seemed to resent her for leaving or for her sudden return.

In fact, nobody seemed to resent Mae for much of anything. Not for the kinds of things her fellow New Yorkers seemed to resent other humans for just as a matter of standard practice—being in line for coffee, for example, or having children who didn’t walk in a straight line on the sidewalk. And not for other things, either. Living with Jay had felt like such a minefield lately. She had almost felt as though she needed to hide her work, to write her blog posts when he wasn’t looking, remove the evidence of the little scenes she staged for Instagram and Facebook and smuggle herself off to record Sparkling behind his back. At Sparkling, things hadn’t been much better. As much as she hadn’t wanted to admit it, Lolly and the women around her hadn’t been listening to Mae’s ideas for weeks. Again and again, she had found herself organizing a room or a cabinet that didn’t end up in the final shoot.

The result, she was realizing, had been that she had gone home angry or frustrated. Maybe she hadn’t been a whole lot of fun for Jay, either. Or the kids, who seemed to be loving Merinac. She’d sent them with Jessa down to a shallow wading spot on the river today. That would have been a much more pleasant way to get her hands wet. But no. She was here with the chicken baths, and they weren’t even close to done.

Her mother leaned on the counter beside the sink, where they were soaking some of the bags that were closest to defrosted, and closed her eyes. It was physical work, the moving of the chickens and the dumping of the water, and Barbara had not spared herself any of it. And even though she couldn’t figure out how, Mae knew that on some level, her mother and Andy were right: this was somehow her fault.

“You need a break, Mom.” She put a hand on her mother’s broad back. “Why don’t you go back to the house for a while?”

“I didn’t sleep well,” Barbara said. “It’s nothing.”

“I didn’t say there was anything wrong. Just that you could probably use a break. Go check on Aunt Aida. Make sure she’s getting glamorous for tonight.”

Andy, carrying a bucket of chicken pieces, came into the kitchen. “You guys are slowing down,” he said, and Mae glared at him. To her surprise, he seemed to catch on immediately. “Which is fine,” he said, looking at Barbara. “We’re closer to done than it looks, and I just called Zeus to come a little early. We’ll be on to normal prep in about an hour. If Mae helps, we’ll catch up long before the cameras arrive.”

Barbara untied her apron and hung it on its hook. “If we’re that close, I will take a break,” she said. “Mae, don’t forget to leave yourself a little time to clean up. You’re a mess.”

Without looking back, she left the kitchen, and Andy laughed. “She won’t thank us for telling her she looks tired,” he said.

“No,” agreed Mae. “She hates to be told what to do, too.”

“Runs in the family, I’m guessing,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like your Mimi doesn’t even want me looking at her recipe. I swear the frame falls off the wall whenever I come near it. I had to hang it back up this morning.”

“I wouldn’t think you needed a recipe by now.”

“I just like to check my proportions every now and then, imbibe a little of the spirit of the original cook. Even if she might not have liked me much.”

“I don’t think she was big on men.”

“We’re really not all alike.” He finished shifting the chicken from the bucket to the sink and paused, a serious look on his face. “Hey, have you noticed anything odd about your mother?”

Mae froze, then quickly turned so Andy couldn’t see her expression. She had, and she didn’t want to talk about it. Barbara seemed flatter, somehow, and when she wasn’t flat, she was obsessing about this win, and about money, in a way Mae had never seen. Yesterday, with the exception of her willingness to clean up Mimi’s, she had been even more Barbara-like than usual, and Mae had felt reassured, only to watch her mother fade away as the day wore on. Today she’d disappeared even more quickly. This chicken job had not been fun, but it seemed to have taken a lot out of Barbara. And yesterday, after work, Barbara had been much quieter than usual, even with Ryder and Madison. But Andy didn’t need to know any of that.

“She seems great,” Mae said. “Glad to see us, working as hard as ever.”

Andy shrugged. “She gets tired earlier than she did when I first got here. She leaves more things to me—of course, that was the idea, but I get the sense she’s not what you’d call a delegator.” He gave Mae a hard look and lowered his voice. “And the mess. I keep having to take bags out, stuff she’s left here that we can’t work around. It’s not just the house anymore.”

Oh no, Mae thought. He knew. He had to know—of course he would. How could he not? She looked down at the ground, then spoke before she could catch her words and hold them back—because the Moores never, ever talked about this with outsiders.