The Chicken Sisters(78)

And Barbara must have been carrying all that around with her for years, since her own mother died, since she came back and took over the house and the business and the two live old ladies, not to mention the dead one. Did Barbara feel her mother in the house the way they all felt Mimi? For Mae, the spirit of the house and Mimi’s was a little sad, a little funny, occasionally a little creepy. But she had never really thought about how it felt for her mother to take on the responsibility for the whole thing when she was only in her twenties—more than a decade younger than Mae was now.

Mae knew what her mother was thinking even before she said it, because Mae was thinking it, too. “I needed this place, when we came back here, when Mom died,” Barbara said. “I had to leave your father; I didn’t finish school. Mimi’s saved us. I was lucky to have it to come back to. But—you don’t need it, Mae. And I don’t think you want it.”

Lucky to have it to come back to. On some level, that was what Mae had been feeling all week. What had initially felt like a trip to purgatory had come to feel like a journey to a refuge, a place where all the things that started out as fun before becoming mandatory elements of selling the Mae Moore brand didn’t matter anymore. The social media posts, the pictures, the constant chatter—even with the omnipresent Food Wars, the noise of it all died away under the reality of running Mimi’s, keeping the kids and Jessa busy, even the ongoing battle with Amanda, all very present and pressing things with surprisingly little foothold in the digital world.

When Mae saw the video of her mother’s house online, the sudden re-intrusion of that chattery place with all of its rush to judgment had been as much of a shock as the revelation of this piece of her history itself. Sitting here now with Barbara and Aida, it was all gone again, or at least so distant that it didn’t really matter. This was real life. She was proud of her book and the people she’d helped while she was writing it, but the rest—the whole person she had built online—was slipping away, and somehow she didn’t mind much. All that was what she’d thought she wanted. Maybe she was wrong. How were you supposed to make good decisions if you didn’t even know what you wanted?

“I think maybe I do need it,” she said softly, then realized neither her mother nor Aida could hear her. She raised her voice. “I don’t know, Mom. I don’t think I’m quite ready to give up on Mimi’s yet.”

Her mother turned and looked straight into her eyes. “Does that mean you’re giving up on something else?”

Jay. Jay was not distant. He’d been in her mind this whole time, she realized. Not the superficial Jay, the one who thought champagne would cure everything, but the underneath Jay, the one who cared enough to tell her they were toasting not her failure but her—their—ability to start again The man who missed his baseball mitt. The real Jay.

But no matter how great that real Jay was, he did not know who the real Mae was. Would he get that Mae? Barbara did. Aida did. Mimi’s did. Amanda—might.

How could Amanda have not seen something was happening with Barbara, not told Mae, not been here trying to help her make things right? Yes, their mother was stubborn, and it probably wasn’t entirely Amanda’s fault that she and Barbara didn’t talk much, but that didn’t give Amanda a free pass. You didn’t just walk away from someone you loved. It was time somebody reminded Amanda about that.

Mae’s hand went to her phone, and Jay’s message, still unanswered. Sometimes it was easier to fight with people than to fight for them. She stared up at the ceiling, blinking, and pressed her lips together until she was sure she could speak. “I’ll figure it out, Mom.” She sighed, then pushed herself off the barstool so hard it skidded back behind her. Enough of this. “Right now, we have cleaning to do.”





AMANDA





As if everything turned on Amanda’s mood, the night went downhill after Nancy left. Suddenly, no one wanted the cameras there. They avoided them, squirmed away, stopped conversations in midsentence while Sabrina and her crew persisted. “I don’t want you to film the inside of my purse,” Amanda overheard Mary Laura snap.

She was tired. Physically tired, but also that same tired she’d been trying to push away all that time ago when she wrote that first e-mail to Food Wars. Tired of every night at the hostess stand, tired of closing, tired of all the smiling and the sense that she was always on, part of so many families’ traditions and yet feeling so rootless herself.

The drive home with a silent and angry Gus, Frankie scrolling through her phone, interspersing dramatic gasps and frantic typing with glares at Amanda, felt endless. She refused to touch her own phone again until they’d all gone to their separate corners of the house, and now, scanning Facebook, she wished she had left it off until morning.

Comments about the mouse and the pies and the likelihood that anyone who lived like that could run a clean restaurant should have been deeply satisfying to someone who had thought pretty much the same thing since she was ten years old, but Amanda mostly found it unsettling. There was just so much venom. How could people with nothing at stake produce so much passion?

And then, Patches.

People like this shouldn’t be allowed to own a dog.

Someone get those puppies out of there!





I hope they called the Humane Society after they took this video.