The Chicken Sisters(92)

“That’s kind of hot, really,” he said finally. “I hope you, like, remember some things.”

She punched his arm, then, feeling a little bolder, took his arm and pulled him the rest of the way down the trail. They’d reached the fallen tree, and Jay found a good place to sit on its trunk.

“Amanda and I used to play down here,” Mae said, taking a seat beside him.

“That would be back when you weren’t pushing each other across a big reality TV stage, I expect.”

Mae sighed. “We got a little worked up. Okay, a lot worked up. It’s just—she did things, and I did things, and my mom really needs to win this. This part is bad. She owes money on a mortgage I didn’t know about. She probably has Parkinson’s. And”—Mae put her hands on her knees and stared straight down at the ground—“she’s worried about what comes next. For Mimi’s. For her. For me. She needs me, Jay. And I guess—I need her, and this place. That’s why I said that, about staying, and I’m not sure what I meant, exactly, but I can’t just run away. Again.”

This was hard. Much harder than the rest of it, than the history. They’d felt close again, just a minute ago, and now she was probably throwing all that away, but this was also it—her clearing all those internal counters. She didn’t want to be keeping anything from him. No more secrets, no matter what it cost her.

And it might cost her a lot. Jay was silent—too silent, not touching her—and she didn’t dare look at him. The old Mae would have told him that she didn’t care what he thought or what he wanted, even if she did. The old Mae would not have given him the power to hurt her that she was extending now. But that had never worked as well as she’d liked to pretend it had.

“I miss you, Jay. I miss us, cheering each other on. And I really, really want us to find our way back to that, and I also want to give my mom the support she’s going to need, and I don’t know how to make it all work. I guess I don’t even know if you want to, at this point. What I want to do is—” She took a deep breath and risked a glance up at him, but he was staring at the ground under his feet. “I know you’ve been saying you want to quit so we can spend a year traveling, but I wondered . . . I thought we could spend a year here. Or more. Maybe we could travel too, once I know what my mom’s health will be like. But seriously, Jay, you could do everything you want to do here. Think, be with the kids, meditate, whatever. It’s just a different way of looking at it.” She gestured around, at the river, the fallen tree, the saplings already springing up to take its place. “It’s peaceful. With the trees. And the river. You’ve got room to, uh, hear the trees falling.”

Jay gave her a look that combined doubt with sarcasm at that.

“You know, like they fall, and does anyone hear them? You can hear them.” Mae felt like her pitch was falling flat. What would she do if he said no? Last night, with her mom, in that house where generations of women had been let down by their men, she had let herself hope that Jay was different. Jay had never let her down. Maybe she was the one letting him down. Twenty-four hours ago he hadn’t known Merinac existed; now she was begging him to give up his life—a life he hated, but still—and move here. For her. She must have lost her mind.

“The guy at security boarding the flight out of St. Louis looked at my driver’s license and made a joke about turbans,” Jay said.

“Oh.” She looked up at him. He was smiling, a little. “Well, that was St. Louis. It’s different here. Worse.”

“Mae.” Jay took her hand, pulling her, shifting her toward him. “I miss you, too. I’ve been missing you. For a long time. And I love your fire, and how hard you go after things, and how you pushed me to do the same. But when I started to feel like I didn’t want those things, it was like you couldn’t even hear me. You just kept rolling forward.”

“I hear you now, though. I really do. You were right. What’s here, what’s in front of us—that’s what matters. And what’s in front of us is this—my mom, Mimi’s. Not Instagram, not even Food Wars. We have to experience life to have anything worth sharing. It’s time to get real. I get it.”

Jay’s eyebrows turned downward, and he squeezed her hand harder. “That’s what’s in front of you, Mae. Not me. You’re like a steamroller, and I don’t even get to help choose the direction.”

This was not at all what Mae wanted to hear, and she grabbed Jay’s other hand. “But you did help choose, don’t you see? This is just another version of stepping back and figuring out who we are, who you are, and what we want. For ourselves, for Madison and Ryder. In a different place. I want a different kind of simple now, and it’s the same kind you want. I want it with you, Jay.”

Jay sighed deeply and looked around. To Mae, this spot was beautiful, with the still-new bright leaves on the saplings, the river, slow and muddy here, with tiny insects buzzing over the surface. But Jay might not see what she saw.

In the silence, a bird whistled an alarm from somewhere above them and another answered it. “I want you, Mae,” he finally said. “And I want our family. But I’m not sure I want this.”

Feeling like she was taking a step out onto one of the fallen tree’s fragile branches, Mae spoke softly. “I’m not sure I want this either. But my mom might be really sick, and then there’s my aunt, and Mimi’s. I feel like I might have to decide to want it, to make it what I want. But I don’t want to do it alone.”