The Chicken Sisters(79)

Food Wars ought to be ashamed if those dogs are still in that house.





Amanda read every word, the pit in her stomach deepening. Sabrina’s words stuck with her like a song you hated but just couldn’t get out of your head. You knew exactly what I would do. If you didn’t want this out there, you wouldn’t have told me.

All she had wanted to do was even the playing field. Her sister had accused her of something Mae should know Amanda would never do. Why didn’t Amanda get to tell about something Mae did do—or at least, something Mae didn’t do? Mae left town years ago like her tail was on fire and barely came back, and when she did come back, she did nothing to improve conditions at Barbara’s, even though it was her job to help people clean up their spaces. This was perfectly fair.

And it was true.

And she shouldn’t have to feel bad.

When Amanda felt bad, she drew, and as she put the phone on the table, facedown, as though that would keep the mean comments about her mother contained, her other hand reached into her tote bag, rummaging for her sketchbook. Which wasn’t there.

After a moment of panic, Amanda remembered. She’d shoved it in the junk drawer, of course. She got up to get it, already feeling the pencil between her fingers, but when she opened the drawer, the sketchbook was gone.

She yanked the drawer out of the bar, not caring that she spilled half the contents on the floor, and knelt, sticking her arm all the way back in. It must have gotten caught, stuck in the back of the drawer like sometimes happened with the piles of bills and mail she dropped into the drawer to get them out of sight, but there was nothing. Nothing in the drawer that remotely resembled a sketchbook. Nothing behind the drawer at all.

Amanda opened every drawer in the kitchen. She dumped out every basket of magazines from under the coffee table, scrutinized every cabinet, moved every pile, and then opened every drawer again. She knew where she put it, and it wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t anywhere.

She gave up. Amanda took two of the Ambien left over from the prescription she’d never used up after Frank’s death, added a whiskey chaser, put a pillow over her head, and went to sleep.



* * *



×


Seven hours later, she woke to a terrible taste in her mouth and a vague sense of foreboding that didn’t get any better when she considered the day ahead. Her hand, as always, had gone to her phone almost before she was even awake. She had sent Nancy one text last night, asking her if they could talk, just one, although she had typed and deleted many more.

Nancy had finally replied.

I don’t know what to say anymore, Amanda, I don’t know how to fix this. I only know where I will be tomorrow—at your mother’s, helping her get out of this mess, if she’ll have me.

You’d better be there, too.

She would be, but she didn’t have to like it. Angrily, Amanda dragged herself out of the bed, leaving its twisted sheets and fallen pillows strewn across the floor, pulled on a sloppy T-shirt and cutoff shorts that Frankie had somehow missed in her sweeping condemnation and purge of Amanda’s wardrobe, and stomped out of the house without even bothering with coffee. It wasn’t going to help.

A different Amanda would have driven her car in the opposite direction. Instead, she parked down the road and walked slowly toward everything she most wanted to avoid. By the time she reached Mimi’s, half of her mother’s house appeared to be out on the front lawn.

Half of the house, and half of the town. None of these people had ever lifted a finger to help when the girls were little and so caught up in Barbara’s mess. None of them had done more than offer a pat on the arm and maybe a casserole when Frank died. Now, here were the Russells, and Pinky Heckard, and Crystal Kennedy, carrying bags and boxes, trotting in and out the front door as though there were no more natural thing in the world, when Amanda could barely remember that door being used over the course of her entire lifetime. As she watched, Morty Rountree’s wife backed a pickup into the driveway, and Morty threw a box up into it. There they all were, cleaning out the house as though that, too, was nothing unusual. Just hauling three decades’ worth of crap out of the town haunted house, you know. Like you do. This must have been Mae’s doing, and Amanda didn’t like it.

Nancy had to be there somewhere, but Amanda didn’t see her, and wasn’t sure she wanted to, anyway. Amanda walked around to the back of the house because going in through that front door would just be too weird, and found herself with a perfect view of her sister, holding court in the kitchen, surrounded by acolytes awaiting her bidding. There was a shout of laughter, and Amanda could see Mae framed in the glass of one of the windows over the sink and the camera in the other. Kenneth was on one side of her sister, Patrick on the other. All three looked delighted with themselves. Mae, laughing. The camera, fawning.

This was what Mae got? Years of letting everything pile up without lifting a polished professional finger to help her own mother and now she looked like a Disney princess, basking in the sunshine streaming through the windows amid happy laughter from the crowd? How could anyone just let Mae give the orders when Mae had been part of the problem, giving up on Barbara as soon as she herself could get away? This was total bullshit. After decades in this town, Amanda had shit to show for it. Mae was back for ten minutes, and she was running the place. No matter how hard Amanda tried, Mae seemed to come out on top.