The Chicken Sisters(75)

She probably could clean up the house, if Barbara would let her. But if she cleaned it up and walked away, the change wouldn’t last, and while Sabrina might not care about that, Mae did. When Barbara’s mess overtook Mae’s efforts, she felt herself disappearing, like writing in the sand erased by the tide. She couldn’t do it again.

But what choice did she have? No matter what Mae did next, there was one thing she couldn’t change: everybody knew. Sabrina, Jessa, Lolly, all of them. They knew where Mae had come from and how much she didn’t belong with them.

And Jay. He would know that Mae’s entire being was rooted in a mess she had never been able to change, that where other people had something normal and secure, she had a big, fat pile of trash sliding under her feet. And he would know that she hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him.

Everything she had built for herself was already gone.

Mae found Barbara inside Mimi’s, sitting quietly, doing nothing. The kitchen, the counter, the tiny dining area, all were restored to the shipshape order Mae and her team had created what felt like years ago, and it was an order that came naturally to the utilitarian space. Everything and everyone had a purpose at Mimi’s, and the complications of the outside world just didn’t apply. Mae stood silently next to her mother for a moment, wishing they never had to leave.

The instant they stepped out of Mimi’s, the door swung shut behind them, and when Barbara put her hand back to check the latch, she found the door already locked.

“I guess we’re supposed to go home,” said Mae, trying to speak lightly. It was rare for more than one of them to be around when the ghost of Mimi made herself known, and somehow that made it more creepy, rather than less. Barbara put a hand on Mae’s shoulder as she followed Mae down the step, and Mae was surprised to feel it shaking. She reached up and took it.

“I’m so sorry, Mom.” There was no point in avoiding this any longer. They walked, still holding hands, along the path around to the back of the house. “I talked to Sabrina, but it didn’t make any difference.” Mae let go of her mother’s hand and sank down on the familiar step, scratching the toe of her shoe around in the dirt, raising one of the smells of her childhood.

“No, I’m sorry.” As she spoke, Barbara opened the door behind Mae to let Patches out, and the dog trotted into the tall grass to pee. Barbara descended heavily next to Mae, and Patches, apparently unconcerned about her puppies, returned to plant herself on the stoop as well. Barbara put one arm around the dog and the other on Mae’s knee. Three lousy mothers, thought Mae irrelevantly.

She leaned on Barbara and shook her head. “I got you into this,” she said. “You never would have done the show if I hadn’t told you it was a good idea. And Amanda never would have thought of it, probably, if I hadn’t done Sparkling.” Amanda. Thinking of her sister, Mae’s anger returned, but it was muted, somehow, by all that had come since. This was all Amanda’s fault. So why did it feel like Mae’s fault, too, like the inevitable destination of a train she had boarded a long time ago? “I got us all into this mess.”

“I think your Internet would say I got us into this mess,” Barbara said.

Mae tilted her head sideways to look at her mother. There was nothing to say to that. If this was where Mae’s train had always been headed, her mother had bought the tickets. But Barbara had never admitted it before.

Behind them, the house, and the mess, loomed, as bad as it had ever been and maybe worse. It was spreading over to Mimi’s, and no matter what her mother said about being careful with the pies, that mouse said something different. It was lucky the pies had come from Patrick that week. But if Barbara could even acknowledge that the mess was a problem . . . the teenaged Mae had tried to talk to her mother about it. Of course she had. Why buy one more thing? Why keep it all? Why pile it up higher than Mae’s head, why stack it in bathtubs until only one shower remained functional, why take every orphaned chair or abandoned magazine from the end of every driveway and bring it here to rest?

But Barbara, who was so open to Mae in every other way, shut down at every turn when it came to the house. Mae could beg, she could stand right in Barbara’s face and scream herself hoarse, and Barbara would just wait until she was finished and then walk away. Mae didn’t know if Patti argued with her, didn’t know if their father had ever tried to come back, didn’t know if anyone else had ever tried to do a damn thing, but if they had, it hadn’t helped. Barbara never alluded to the state of the house except to grow angry when challenged about it, but maybe that mouse, and Patches, meant Mae had a chance to get through to Barbara in a way she never could before. Maybe Barbara would listen. Maybe Mae could make this Food Wars thing go away and make things better for Barbara while she was here. And maybe Andy could keep Mimi’s from being sucked under after Mae was gone, if he stuck around. But those were big maybes. As big as, if not bigger than, the one that waited for her back in Brooklyn.

They sat like that, staring out into the darkness, until Barbara broke the silence. “So, what do we have to do?”

Mae looked at her with surprise. She hadn’t said they had to do anything, and she wasn’t at all sure she could go through with Sabrina’s plan, even though it was hard to see any other way out of this.

“For Sabrina,” her mother said impatiently. “Obviously it doesn’t do her any good to just trash things like this. What’s she left with, then—Frannie’s wins on a technicality? That’s crap TV. She must want something.”