The Chicken Sisters(69)

“You cannot tell them we could stay,” she said, speaking loudly over Ryder, who was beginning to cry. “You’re just—confusing them.”

“You could stay,” said Barbara. Her voice was distant, a little off, but then she turned and looked at Mae and blinked a little, as if focusing on her for the first time. “You could. Of course I know you won’t. But you could.” Then, as if it followed: “Have you talked to your sister today?”

Had she— For a minute, Mae had forgotten. Hell yeah, she’d talked to Amanda today. But this was not the moment to say any of that to Barbara, who had bent down to hug Ryder and Madison.

“You can see the puppies again tomorrow,” she promised. “You’ll still be here tomorrow. Maybe Amanda could drop your cousin Gus by. Or Frankie.” Mae braced herself for more questions—Madison and Ryder had not seen their cousins, had not, apparently, made the connection that cousins who had never been more than lines on a Christmas card might be live, accessible beings in this wonderful town full of puppies and doughnuts, and she did not need them to make it now, when meeting those cousins wasn’t going to happen until—when? How? Had Amanda even realized how much her words would put an end to? Barbara put her hands to her back, stretching, and Mae was again struck by how exhausted she looked. Probably helping Patches have puppies had been an all-night thing. This thing, Amanda, the house . . . This was not going to help.

“Can we talk about Amanda later, Mom? We talked. But about Food Wars stuff. Forget the park, okay? Maybe go home and rest before tonight. They’re going to come back and film once more.” That’s where Sabrina had left it, anyway. One more night of filming, just in case we need it. For what, Mae couldn’t think about. There was no way she could avoid telling her mother about Amanda and the recipe, but the house—if Sabrina would just leave it alone, Mae was still hoping her mother didn’t have to know how far Amanda had been willing to go to hurt Mimi’s, and Mae. And Barbara.

“Later. Okay.” Her mother straightened, turned, and walked away, and Mae watched her go, weirdly comforted by their return to a relationship in which they did not even have to say good-bye, while Madison and Ryder ran for the swings.

Mae and Barbara, and Madison and Ryder, had gained something this week. But right now, Mae was more worried about what Barbara might be about to lose.

Gus was her mother’s go-to when she needed something moved or fixed, Frankie her recipient of the gifts Barbara loved to buy, spiral notebooks bearing kitten pictures, magnifying mirrors, costume jewelry, brightly colored, slightly cracked plastic containers. Barbara had a hard time living in a world in which so much was so cheap. Mae knew this from Frankie’s #withlovefromGrandma hashtag on Instagram, which she had at first resented on her mother’s behalf and then realized was really a loving tribute from someone who—like Mae—had no intention of letting anyone but herself decide what came into her space.

Amanda’s words, though, had set off something that Mae couldn’t keep from crashing into all of their spaces. Frankie didn’t know it yet, unless Amanda had told her, which Mae doubted. Gus didn’t know. Barbara didn’t know. They had all, along with Andy, been stripped bare by Food Wars, and what Mae felt above all was responsible. If she had said no to Barbara, if she had gone with her original gut that no good would come to Barbara from letting strangers into her private world, they would all still have each other. Instead, they were stuck in this weird limbo of a script someone else was writing, and even running away from it, as Mae was tempted to do, would be written in, would play out on this stage.

She could take it, if she had to. Andy could take it. But anything Sabrina did besides nothing was going to cost her mother something, and she didn’t really believe Sabrina would do nothing. There would be something. Mae spent all afternoon trying not to imagine what.

Even so, it wasn’t until she saw the Facebook post that she began to realize how much Food Wars could do—or how much of Barbara’s world they could destroy.



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The video, posted to the Food Wars Facebook page, started with a confusing image. On closer inspection, Mae saw it was a squirming pile of puppies. Then, as the camera pulled back, Patches, tongue out, looking quite content (as she should; there was a visible pile of dog treats in front of her). And then, as the camera pulled back more . . .

Shit.

Oh shit.

Oh fuck.

As the camera pulled back more, there was the inside of her mother’s house. How? How had they gotten in, without her even knowing? The dog bed turned out to be partly on a sofa and partly on a coffee table pulled up in front of the sofa. The rest of the sofa, and the floor in front of the sofa, was piled with things, with closed boxes and open boxes with rolled paper and tool handles sticking out, stacks of magazines and more paper, clothing on hangers, in dry-cleaning bags, over the tops of boxes and the back of the sofa.

The view changed to the kitchen, to stacks of unwashed dishes next to equally filthy pans next to new sets of pans and Tupperware, still in boxes, with open cereal boxes on top of them, and on the floor, still more. As Mae stared, horrified, the camera zoomed in on the bottom of a fifty-pound bag of flour, clearly chewed through, and—Goddamn it, how had the cameraperson gotten so lucky?—a mouse skittered out and disappeared under a nearby pile of coats.