The Chicken Sisters - K.J. Dell'Antonia Page 0,112

felt as though she’d been standing at the edge for too long.

“I did all this, I know,” she said. “I brought Food Wars here, I went a little nuts trying to win—and now—I don’t want this anymore. I don’t know if I ever did. Even when Frank was alive, I wasn’t—all in anymore. He knew it. I applied to art school in Kansas City. I was going to commute, but he didn’t think it would work. We were fighting. He thought I was unhappy, and I was, but not with him.” Not with him, maybe with him . . . That was the one thing that really didn’t matter anymore. “We were trying to figure it out, and I want to think we would have, but I just don’t know. And then he was gone . . .”

Tears started running down Amanda’s cheeks, and Nancy reached for her, but Amanda gently pulled away. She wanted to find comfort in Nancy’s arms, but for the first time, she knew she wanted something else more.

“I love you so much, Nancy. I don’t want to lose you. If I’m not at Frannie’s, if I do something else, I don’t even know what, but something—would you still, I mean, how much would things change between us?”

It was too much to hope that Nancy would understand. Amanda could barely understand it herself. Because it just didn’t fit together. If she loved her life, and Frannie’s, and Nancy—if she’d loved Frank, and raising her kids—why would she want something else? It was what she’d been asking herself, yelling at herself, for months. Did wanting something more mean you regretted everything that led to what you’d got?

Nancy turned to her but paused before she spoke. “You don’t want to work at Frannie’s anymore?”

Amanda couldn’t take it. She thought she was ready, but she wasn’t, not really, not to really be on her own. “I do, I mean, I kind of do, it’s not exactly that I don’t want to—”

“No, don’t take it back. You said something. You don’t want to work at Frannie’s anymore. You want to do something else. And you’re afraid that will make me less your family.” Nancy sat back in her seat, and then suddenly, with resolve, started the car again and pulled out into the road. “I can fix that too. Sometimes I think you don’t even know what family is, Amanda. Of course you won’t lose me if you don’t work at Frannie’s. There’s nothing you could do to lose me, and I need you to know it—and then I need you to really know it, and to be it, with your family. Because what I’m asking myself, Amanda, and what Gus might ask, or Frankie, is—does that mean there’s something I could do to lose you?”

“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