The Chicken Sisters - K.J. Dell'Antonia Page 0,111

shoulder widened a little, a pull-off for balers and hay wagons to head into the fields that lined either side of the road. She answered the easiest question first. “We’re going to Frannie’s,” she said to Amanda. “And I was angry about your mother, of course. Still am. I can’t believe you’d hang her out to dry like that, no matter how she’s treated you.”

“Mae said I stole the recipe for the seasoning on the chicken,” Amanda said. “On camera. In front of everyone. Andy said”—she hated even saying his name—“Andy said he tasted it yesterday, and now Frannie’s chicken is exactly the same as Mimi’s—and he says it wasn’t like that before. I didn’t plan to tell them about Mom. I was just so angry.” Amanda prepared herself for the next question: But how would they think you got the recipe out of Mimi’s? She would have to admit it, that she had been in there, with Andy. Dallying, as Sabrina put it.

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