The Chicken Sisters(68)

Leaving them all behind, Amanda ushered Frankie into the house and shut the door.





MAE





It took just long enough for Mae to feel safe before Sabrina made her move.

After Amanda’s announcement, a mostly quiet Sabrina, apparently lost in thought, returned Andy to Mimi’s and dropped Mae at the park where she was meeting Barbara and the kids. Mae was still conducting a one-sided argument with the Food Wars host as they pulled up at the curb. Her mother’s house had nothing to do with Mimi’s, or Food Wars, she said. It would be unfair to capitalize on it when that had not been what Barbara agreed to; it was just a distraction.

To all of it, Sabrina kept repeating that she wasn’t in charge. “You know how this works, Mae. There’re higher-ups. There are producers back at the ranch. I just do the filming. I have to say, you and your sister have given us plenty to work with.”

Sabrina had more clout than she was admitting, and Mae knew it. It was infuriating. Amanda was not, as Sabrina called her, “a dark horse.” She was a traitor and a fool, and she was going to ruin them all, because nothing Barbara did or was could change what Amanda had done. She was just dragging them down with her.

And now Mae was stuck. No Barbara, no kids, no car. Out of habit, she opened Instagram and Facebook and closed them a dozen times, sitting on the park bench, waiting, barely knowing what she was waiting for. She itched to do something. Anything.

If Sabrina decided to put it out there, then what? Would they try to film the house? It was bad in there, surely; it had to be bad. Should she try to— No. There was no going there. Her whole adult relationship with her mother was built on not touching the past.

What would Jay do? That was the one thing she could do. She could call him. Jay knew what it was to paper over a big chunk of childhood and just go forward from there. His mother left him with his father, taking his sister instead, when he was three, and the family never lived together again, and never talked about it either. But they managed cordial if overly formal meals in his mother’s Manhattan town house every month.

But while Jay knew that there were things Mae and Barbara avoided, he had no idea how much of her past Mae had edited out when she left for college, and Mae wasn’t sure she could stand him knowing. How could he not see her differently if he saw how she had been raised, if he knew about the squalor and the lengths she’d gone to, to escape it?

There was so much to explain, but maybe it was time. Being here, sliding back into her old self, watching Kenneth and Patrick—she didn’t know exactly what she wanted from Jay, but she wanted him to be part of this, somehow. He said they’d talk later. Maybe later should be now.

But Jay didn’t answer, and Mae, frustrated, couldn’t think of what to put in a text. He would see she had called.

He would call her back.

Of course he would.

Just as Mae, unable to stand waiting for one more thing, was about to abandon the bench and search for her mother and the kids, there they were. Madison was running up the sidewalk to her, Ryder, smaller and slower, trailing behind, both shouting. “Mommy, Mommy, you have to come in and see them! They’re so cute! Mommy, can we have one, please, the girl one, I want to call her Elsa, she’s mostly white, she’s so cute!”

Ryder grabbed at his sister as he caught up. “No, the black one! Blackie!”

Wait, what? Mae looked to Barbara in confusion.

“Patches had her puppies last night.”

“Patches was pregnant?”

“Of course Patches was pregnant, Mae, do you not have eyes? Did you not see how her belly was practically dragging on the ground?”

Yeah, but she just thought the dog was fat, figuring her mother was about as good at feeding dogs healthy things as she had been with her kids. “I don’t know much about dogs,” she said. Then, for good measure: “It’s not like we had one when I was little.” Should she say anything to Barbara? No. Not yet. Her mother was tired; she could see it. Madison and Ryder took a lot out of anyone. Maybe the thought of adding to Barbara’s list of complaints against Amanda should have made Mae happy, but it didn’t. Instead, she knelt down and hugged both Madison and Ryder hard, but neither could hold still.

“Grandma said if we lived here, we could have one. Both of us.” Madison was dancing around Mae, pulling her off-balance.

“Mom!”

Barbara shrugged. “So what? They could. But you don’t, kids, so that’s that.”

“I can’t believe you said that to them.” Mae turned toward the park, hoping Madison would be distracted by the swing or slide, and Barbara turned away, as if to walk back toward Mimi’s and home. Mae grabbed her mother’s arm. “Mom. This way. You’re coming with us, remember?”

Ryder wrapped his arms around Barbara’s leg. “I gone throw ball puppies,” he said. “When they big like me.”

“Mom!” What had her mother been saying? “We’re just visiting, Ryder. We’re going to go home to Daddy, and then someday we will come back and see the puppies again.”

Ryder stared up at her. “I want Daddy,” he said, just as Madison said, “Grandma said we could stay,” and now Mae was kneeling to try to soothe Ryder and still being pulled on by Madison, and her mother was just standing there, staring off down the street, an oddly blank look on her face that made Mae want to shake her.