The Chicken Sisters(97)

Amanda held up the eye itself, hook and short chain still attached to both eye and sign. “I guess.” She paused, raising her eyebrows at her sister. “I guess it just got too heavy.”

Mae looked at the four inches of screw in her sister’s hand, and at the sign—a weight, sure, but nothing she couldn’t pick up herself if she had to—and raised her own eyebrows. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Too much for the old place to bear.”

All the fight had gone out of her with her panicked reaction to the noise, and from Amanda, too, it looked like. Mae sat down on the edge of the porch, and Amanda left the sign, stepping down into the freshly mown grass of the tiny yard between the porch and sidewalk and sitting next to her.

“Or . . .” Amanda shrugged, and leaned gently into Mae’s shoulder again.

“Or,” agreed Mae. She reached out again and took her sister’s hand. “I’m sorry,” Mae said, at exactly the same moment that Amanda said it too. They both laughed, but Mae was the one who kept going. She didn’t want to be fighting with Amanda. Not anymore. It was just so easy to go down that road with her sister. One of them said something, and the other said something, and then neither of them wanted to back down. Like a big game of chicken. Mae laughed, and Amanda looked at her, but she couldn’t explain. “Kenneth was mad at me, actually,” she said. “He saved me with his sign, but he was pretty pissed. I’m really sorry.”

Amanda sighed and leaned against her harder. “Say that again,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I ruined your sign.” She was. But she couldn’t let Amanda off too easy. “And you better be sorry too, because what you pulled next caused us a world of hurt. We had to use frozen chicken, did you know? We had to spend the whole day water-defrosting them. My hands are still chapped.” Mae held them out for her sister to see, then realized they didn’t look very bad and put them down. “They still feel chapped, anyway.”

“Yeah.” Amanda looked intently at her feet, as if she was considering her old Birkenstocks carefully, but Mae knew better. “I do feel bad about that,” Amanda said. “I really do.”

“I’m sorry I told them about the biscuits,” Mae said. She was kind of sorry, anyway. That one still made Mae want to laugh.

“Why’d you come anyway, Mae? I told you, you didn’t have to.”

Mae shrugged. Did she really want to answer that? It was almost embarrassing, how big her plans had been, and how dumb, really. Amanda sat, waiting. “I came home because I thought I really wanted my own TV show,” Mae finally said. “I figured I’d do this, and the Food Channel would see how great I was. I thought I wanted what Sabrina has, and you know what? She doesn’t have anything.”

“She doesn’t have shit,” Amanda agreed, picking a single long blade of grass that had escaped the mower and putting it between her lips. “Not anything anybody real would want, anyway.” She tried to blow a whistle along the grass and failed dismally.

Mae picked up another blade of grass and blew a perfect tweet, then grinned, knowing she was being annoying. Just annoying enough, maybe. “Why is it so hard for us to figure out what we actually want?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Amanda stopped to consider. She gazed up at the roof of the porch above them, tilting her head back to look at the wall with the ghost of her sign still visible behind them. “Maybe because we never saw anybody want anything that worked out? Maybe because everything we ever wanted turned to trash the minute it came into the house?” Amanda tried to laugh, but Mae could see she meant what she was saying. “Maybe because everything we want dies or basically goes up in smoke? Or no, that’s just me. And what do you mean, anyway? You always get what you want, Mae. Always.”

Mae looked to see if Amanda was starting up their fight again, but no. She was just—saying something she thought was true. Something Mae had thought was true, too, up until just now.

“I get what I go after,” she said slowly. “But that doesn’t mean I go after what I want. I go after—the opposite of Mom. Just like you, I guess. Frannie’s, Nancy, Frank’s whole family—they were not this. For me, it was school, New York, organizing, being famous for being neat and clean”—oh God, it really was funny—“the opposite of our whole life, right? And in the end we’re both still just being pushed around by Mom’s mess.”

Amanda sighed. “What are we going to do? About Mom, I mean.”

“I don’t know. I know it’s big, but I don’t want it to be big. I think—it’s going to take both of us to deal with it.” And that was exactly what she wasn’t ready to talk about right now. She rushed on. “But first, we really have to figure out about Frannie’s—the recipe!” Mae got up and scurried back through Mimi’s, returning with the recipe in her hand. “Not something we want to lose.”

“Yeah,” said Amanda. “I kind of wanted to, though. At first. Just for a minute. I hate that Frank must have known.”

Mae did, too. But Frank was gone, and there was no point in worrying about that. “He just did what his parents did, you know? It’s one or the other. You go along with them, or you run like hell.”

“What his dad did,” Amanda said firmly. “Nancy didn’t know. And she’s trying to help now. With Mom’s house.”