The Chicken Sisters - K.J. Dell'Antonia Page 0,100

Barbara didn’t talk much, but that didn’t give Amanda a free pass. You didn’t just walk away from someone you loved. It was time somebody reminded Amanda about that.

Mae’s hand went to her phone, and Jay’s message, still unanswered. Sometimes it was easier to fight with people than to fight for them. She stared up at the ceiling, blinking, and pressed her lips together until she was sure she could speak. “I’ll figure it out, Mom.” She sighed, then pushed herself off the barstool so hard it skidded back behind her. Enough of this. “Right now, we have cleaning to do.”

AMANDA

As if everything turned on Amanda’s mood, the night went downhill after Nancy left. Suddenly, no one wanted the cameras there. They avoided them, squirmed away, stopped conversations in midsentence while Sabrina and her crew persisted. “I don’t want you to film the inside of my purse,” Amanda overheard Mary Laura snap.

She was tired. Physically tired, but also that same tired she’d been trying to push away all that time ago when she wrote that first e-mail to Food Wars. Tired of every night at the hostess stand, tired of closing, tired of all the smiling and the sense that she was always on, part of so many families’ traditions and yet feeling so rootless herself.

The drive home with a silent and angry Gus, Frankie scrolling through her phone, interspersing dramatic gasps and frantic typing with glares at Amanda, felt endless. She refused to touch her own phone again until they’d all gone to their separate corners of the house, and now, scanning Facebook, she wished she had left it off until morning.

Comments about the mouse and the pies and the likelihood that anyone who lived like that could run a clean restaurant should have been deeply satisfying to someone who had thought pretty much the same thing since she was ten years old, but Amanda mostly found it unsettling. There was just so much venom. How could people with nothing at stake produce so much passion?

And then, Patches.

People like this shouldn’t be allowed to own a dog.

Someone get those puppies out of there!

I hope they called the Humane Society after they took this video.

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