The Chicken Sisters(88)

“No!” Amanda was horrified. Did Nancy think she was disloyal after all?

“No? Not have a messy house, or compete against you to win something, or maybe make you jealous?” Nancy looked hard and quickly at Amanda before turning her eyes back to the road. “Not if I let you down somehow?”

“You would never let me down.” Amanda understood what Nancy was saying. Kind of. But it was different. Her mother and Mae—they weren’t there for her. So how could she be there for them?

“You don’t know that, Amanda. You can’t know that, and maybe you never learned that everyone screws up, sometimes. But we’re going to Frannie’s. There’s something I need you to see. And then we’re going to find a way for you to give your mother and Mae another chance, and for them to see what they’re doing, too. Because this recipe stuff—all this stuff we’re doing—this is ridiculous.” She set her lips in a thin line, and the car sped up. “Ridiculous.”

Amanda started to say something else, to defend herself, but Nancy waved her off. They were there, pulling into the familiar parking lot, which Amanda could already feel growing strange. She wanted to leave it behind, but she would miss it, too. Things already felt changed, no matter what Nancy said, and what Amanda felt most was uncertainty, and a deep conviction that Nancy wasn’t going to let her find an easy way out of it.

Nancy got out of the car fast and walked toward Amanda. As their eyes met, Nancy spoke quickly, as though she’d been rehearsing her line.

“What makes you think I’d want to run Frannie’s without you?”

She turned, and before Amanda could answer, if she’d even known what to say, Nancy was off, briskly striding over the broken-up asphalt toward the restaurant where, in Amanda’s mind, she reigned. Amanda followed Nancy to the kitchen, saying hey to the cooks at the break table and to staff straightening up at the boss’s appearance, trying to look like they hadn’t been slacking off during the usual lull between lunch and the early-bird crowd.

Nancy marched past, through the empty kitchen toward the back wall and the old built-in cabinets, only about ten inches deep, that lined it. She opened the one that was filled with extra containers of salt and various spices and emptied a shelf at eye level, then slid her fingers behind the thin light blue painted panel behind it and pulled.

The panel came off in her hands, and from behind it, Nancy took out what looked like a card wrapped in plastic and handed it to Amanda.

It was a half sheet of lined paper, old, covered in a flowing, spidery script that gave Amanda a shock of recognition. The yellowing cellophane crackled in her hands as she took it.

Fill a large cake pan with flour up to your first knuckle, then salt well. Add pepper until mixture is well spotted, then add three large pinches nutmeg, one pinch mace, pepper again. Dredge chicken in plain flour, buttermilk, spiced flour, before frying in a good quantity of boiling lard.



The paper was oil-spotted and worn; in another hand someone had written Crisco underneath the recipe, and another, mace!!! There were measurements at the bottom, too; 3 tbsp nutmeg 1 tbsp mace to 6 c flour, ? c salt, 3 tbsp pepper. But it was the original writing that transfixed Amanda. Nancy thought this was going to convince Mae that she hadn’t stolen the Mimi’s recipe, but it was more likely to do the opposite. How could they have this at Frannie’s? And what was she going to do now?

Because what she was holding was Mimi’s original recipe, in her handwriting, the same as the one that hung in the Mimi’s kitchen, only scribbled on and worn and without the frame. The same, but different.

Nancy took the recipe from her hands, turned it over, and handed it back to her. “It’s okay. I know. But there’s no way you could have been responsible for this. Read the back.”

Before she could, Amanda heard running footsteps outside the kitchen. Gus burst through the swinging doors and stared at them, as though he hadn’t expected to find them there, then at the paper in Nancy’s hand. He spoke quickly, as if he was a little out of breath.

“I was—I was just coming to find you, Grandma, to get the recipe. I guess—Mom told you?”

Nancy nodded. He turned to Amanda. “We didn’t know what Mae said, Mom. Or I would have shown you yesterday.”

Amanda looked from Gus to Nancy. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“I didn’t know the recipe was here,” Nancy said. “Gus did.”

Gus smiled, a little sadly. “Grandpa showed it to me. Ages ago.”

“But now—” Nancy tapped the paper in Amanda’s hands. “Read the back. Gus hasn’t seen that, either.”

Amanda slowly turned over the page and read aloud.

Frannie, I wish you much luck with Frannie’s. I do not think your man will be up to the job but I wish you much luck with him as well. Do not worry about the loan yet and do not tell him. This money and Frannie’s are yours. Like all men he will want to run things but he is easily fooled. I think that it is best I leave you to it for a while, as he and I will not agree.



—Mimi

And underneath it, in a different hand,

Owe Mimi $1,400, October 29, 1889



There wasn’t any more, but now Amanda knew for certain that the writing was Mimi’s. And she knew something else now, too. Something that changed everything, that was impossible, but was the only answer.