The Chicken Sisters(70)

She read the post above the video: Is this what you want when you go grab some fried chicken? Turns out someone in this Food War has more than a little problem. Can über-organizer Mae Moore clean up anyone’s act, especially when the mess hits close to home? Find out on tomorrow’s mini webisode of Season Four, Round Three of GHTV’s Food Wars.

There were comments. Hundreds already, still coming. At first, mystified—What is this, whose house is it?—then, of course, as people figured it out, as locals weighed in on what she’d always known was an ugly open secret in their small town, exactly the disgust you’d expect. She runs a restaurant? Makes the pies there? Gross!

Not everybody loved Mimi’s, or at least, as she had always known, some people were happy to hit anyone who was down.

There was even an extensive thread about the dog. How can anyone raise puppies like that? That can’t be safe for the animals! Someone get those puppies out of there! I hope you called the ASPCA before you even took this video, shame on you if you didn’t I will take the dog and the puppies when they are taken away please message me ASAP

And so on.

Mae closed her phone, then, unsatisfied, opened it again, intending to turn it all the way off, to lock it in the glove compartment, to leave it behind completely, except that now there was a message, dropped down over red notifications lighting up the little gleaming icons of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, as if to shout over them all.

Really? This is who you are now, an episode of Hoarders? You’re going to exploit some poor hick’s mental illness for your fame or whatever? Come on, Mae. You’re better than that. Don’t let them drag you down.

She had thought she’d braced herself for this, but she hadn’t. The text was a punch to the gut, one Jay must have fired off before even reading the comments, because it wouldn’t take more than a quick skim to realize that Food Wars was hardly what was dragging her down. He must have seen by now that the “poor hick” was Barbara. He would know that the Mae he had married was, at least in part, a lie, that she wasn’t the solid other half she had pretended to be.

And he hadn’t texted her again.

That was it, then. There was no running away now. There was nowhere—no one—to run to.

She should have stayed home. Should have listened to him, accepted the Sparkling verdict, found some other way forward. Of course this plan had turned on her. How could she have expected the very place she wanted to erase from her past to help her find her way? She should have trusted Jay. Jay, who, she had to admit now, really wasn’t trying to ruin anything with his plan for them both to take a break. He just wanted a say in the life they were supposedly building together, and she’d been so busy building it herself that she had barely noticed when he started questioning his part. Just as surely as Sabrina had been single-mindedly setting up the story she wanted to tell, Mae had ignored the fact that some of the players on her stage weren’t happy with their roles, and now someone else was directing the show.

She walked into Mimi’s, where the cameras and the night’s crowds had not yet arrived, unable to disguise her feelings, and as she came through the back door her mother and Andy stopped their conversation and stared at her. It was clear from their expressions that her own emotions were written all over her face.

Andy was the first one to speak. “What happened?” His voice was calm, but as he spoke, he placed a hand under Barbara’s arm, as though he thought he might need to hold her up, and Mae loved him for it.

“They know,” she said, and, seeing that Barbara had of course not understood, explained. “About the house, Mom. Food Wars. They took a video.” Suddenly she couldn’t bear to tell her mother what people were saying about her home, about the dogs. “It’s bad, Mom.”

Barbara reached out a hand, and Mae gave her the phone, where the video was looping over the stream of comments. Andy leaned over her, his arm around his boss, watching quietly. After a moment, Barbara handed the phone back without a word and turned to the counter where she had been working. Mae felt a fury boiling up inside her, with Sabrina, yes, with Amanda, of course, but also with her mother, the person she loved most in the world or at least had loved for the longest. How could her strong, brave, smart mother, a woman who could do anything in the world she set her mind to, let this happen? How did they always end up right back here, with Barbara’s mess threatening to destroy their world?

If Barbara had an answer, she wasn’t offering it.

She was making salad dressing. Mae watched, waiting as long as she could, while Barbara carefully began measuring in the sugar.

“Well?” she finally said.

Barbara looked up, and with a wrenching twist to her insides, Mae saw that her mother was trying not to cry. “I take really good care of Patches,” she said, setting down the jar they used to mix the dressing. “She’s perfectly safe. The puppies are healthy; they’re the healthiest puppies you ever saw. And I’ll get her fixed, I was going to, this happened too fast, we already even had the appointment, I’ve told Jared Brown again and again that he can’t let that big Lab of his run loose without fixing him, but he’s a man, won’t do it.”

“But, Mom—how did they even get in there? Did you let them in?”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t know.”

“Aunt Aida?” That might make sense. She loved a camera.