The Chicken Sisters(87)
But Nancy didn’t ask the next question. Instead, she gripped the steering wheel and stared out into the flat Kansas sunlight. “I should have known there was more to it,” she said. “You wouldn’t do that without what felt like a good reason, and that part is my fault. You don’t need to explain. I do. But it’s easier to show you.”
Amanda didn’t know how to respond to that. What was there for Nancy to explain? Needing something to focus on, she flipped her phone over in her lap, and there it was, the message from Sabrina, with the video. Watch it whenever you feel like shit, she’d said, but it wasn’t going to help the way Amanda was feeling right now.
No one was angry at her. Even Nancy, it seemed, was ready to believe Amanda was just a victim of circumstance. She had a clear path back to her job, her family—everything she had been beating herself over the head for risking for the past twenty-four hours.
But Nancy was wrong. Amanda was the one who had started all of this, and she had started it because she was already unhappy. She had been papering over so much, for so long. For that one morning, when it felt like her whole world had crumbled, she had felt miserable, yes. Crushed. Lost. Alone.
But she had also felt something else, something she hadn’t even been able to sense until it was gone.
Free.
If everything was blowing up around her, she didn’t have any choice. She was going to have to do something else and be someone else, somewhere else, and no one could blame her for it, not one bit.
Instead, the smoke was clearing. What she had taken for bombshells had just been fireworks, with a lot of boom and sparkle and no damage done. She turned to Nancy, who seemed to feel they’d paused long enough; she had her hands on the keys and her foot on the brake. She’d drive Amanda right back to Frannie’s, unless Amanda did something about it.
Unless she blew something up herself.
“Wait,” Amanda said. “I do need to explain.” She reached out and took Nancy’s hand, pulling it away from the keys, and then held it there between them. A wisp of cloud slid overhead, changing the light to shade and lifting, for a moment, the heat that had been growing in the stopped car. She stared out the windshield, aware that she was squeezing Nancy’s hand hard, but she couldn’t seem to stop. “I miss Frank.” That was a terrible place to start, because now she was already gulping back tears. “I loved our life together. Working at Frannie’s, with him, with you, Daddy Frank—”
Nancy squeezed her hand. “I know, honey. I know. This part—you don’t have to explain. It’s time for you to move on.”
Amanda shook her head. “No. You’re not— That’s not all. This is not about Andy, I’m not talking about that, that was just—” What was it? She couldn’t sort that out right now. “This is about us, about Frank, about you and me. You’re my family now, Nancy. Like, really my family.”
“And you’re my family. I just don’t want you to lose your mom and Mae.”
“Don’t you think I already have?” Amanda was still swallowing tears. “It’s you I’m worried about, Nancy. I love my life, I am so grateful for all I have, I don’t want to mess it up—but—” This was so hard, it was like standing at the edge of some terrifying cliff, but Amanda felt as though she’d been standing at the edge for too long.
“I did all this, I know,” she said. “I brought Food Wars here, I went a little nuts trying to win—and now—I don’t want this anymore. I don’t know if I ever did. Even when Frank was alive, I wasn’t—all in anymore. He knew it. I applied to art school in Kansas City. I was going to commute, but he didn’t think it would work. We were fighting. He thought I was unhappy, and I was, but not with him.” Not with him, maybe with him . . . That was the one thing that really didn’t matter anymore. “We were trying to figure it out, and I want to think we would have, but I just don’t know. And then he was gone . . .”
Tears started running down Amanda’s cheeks, and Nancy reached for her, but Amanda gently pulled away. She wanted to find comfort in Nancy’s arms, but for the first time, she knew she wanted something else more.
“I love you so much, Nancy. I don’t want to lose you. If I’m not at Frannie’s, if I do something else, I don’t even know what, but something—would you still, I mean, how much would things change between us?”
It was too much to hope that Nancy would understand. Amanda could barely understand it herself. Because it just didn’t fit together. If she loved her life, and Frannie’s, and Nancy—if she’d loved Frank, and raising her kids—why would she want something else? It was what she’d been asking herself, yelling at herself, for months. Did wanting something more mean you regretted everything that led to what you’d got?
Nancy turned to her but paused before she spoke. “You don’t want to work at Frannie’s anymore?”
Amanda couldn’t take it. She thought she was ready, but she wasn’t, not really, not to really be on her own. “I do, I mean, I kind of do, it’s not exactly that I don’t want to—”
“No, don’t take it back. You said something. You don’t want to work at Frannie’s anymore. You want to do something else. And you’re afraid that will make me less your family.” Nancy sat back in her seat, and then suddenly, with resolve, started the car again and pulled out into the road. “I can fix that too. Sometimes I think you don’t even know what family is, Amanda. Of course you won’t lose me if you don’t work at Frannie’s. There’s nothing you could do to lose me, and I need you to know it—and then I need you to really know it, and to be it, with your family. Because what I’m asking myself, Amanda, and what Gus might ask, or Frankie, is—does that mean there’s something I could do to lose you?”