The Chicken Sisters - K.J. Dell'Antonia Page 0,115
not that much money now, but it was. You really think that all along they knew Frannie’s started with Mimi’s help, and they just never said anything?”
Nancy looked somber. “I don’t want to believe it, but I do.”
“We’ll never know what they knew,” Amanda said gently. “But the one thing we can say for sure is that nobody is coming out of this whole Food Wars thing looking all that great.” Except Mae, she thought, and then she remembered the look on her sister’s face when she’d seen Jay standing there in Barbara’s front yard, watching them battle it out on the porch. She gathered Gus and Nancy in a tight hug, then turned to Gus. “Except you, kiddo. You’re the only one without any secrets.”
Gus started to say something, but Nancy interrupted. “Well, I’m done with this one,” she said. She picked up the recipe and handed to Amanda. “This is yours. It’s up to you to decide what to do with it.”
MAE
You can’t clean out an entire house in a single day, especially when half the people involved have to go to work in the afternoon. To get around that, Sabrina had Mae focus on just the living room, what Mae and her mother had always called the back room, where the puppies had been born and where viewers would expect the fix to happen. While the emptying and cleaning of the rest of the house went on around them, Mae scraped together enough decent furniture to decorate, even staggering down the street holding one corner of a sofa from the Inn’s coffee shop while Jay, Kenneth, and Patrick held the others, in a surreal moment that the younger versions of Kenneth and Mae must have been laughing at, cigarettes and beer in hand, from some vantage point just out of sight. They’d return the sofa later, of course, but Barbara’s sofa wasn’t salvageable, and Sabrina planned to Facebook Live the makeover of the room right then, that afternoon.
At Sabrina’s direction, Mae gathered everything she would need, right down to the smaller details, and essentially put together the room on the lawn. Then she went in, stood in the center of the now-empty room, camera angle carefully set to avoid any of the still-remaining mess, and started directing as Frankie, Kenneth, and Andy brought things in to set up and Jay helped Jessa load Madison and Ryder into the car to head back to the motel for a swim and a nap. Mae described to the Facebook audience why things went where and how she thought Barbara, Aida, and Patches and her puppies would use the room.
“This is not some kind of designer room, obviously,” she told the camera, as she put fresh issues of People and Us Weekly for Aida on the coffee table and the remote control for the TV in a flat basket beside it, “but this is Barbara’s house, and Aida’s, and they should have what they want and love in here, not what I would want and love, or what you would want and love.” Pause, breathe. Good live television, like any good media, meant ending your sentences, letting the viewer take them in. “That means setting up the room for what really happens—the puppies play and get trained and socialized over here, where there’s no carpet and we’ve got rubber mats under all the newspaper, and then my mom and great-aunt Aida do their living here, and there’s room for guests to sit, and easy ways to clean up after the puppies. One reason my mom wasn’t doing that very well before is that it was hard for her to manage her household—but now everything is at hand.”
She smiled. This was the big ending, the part she’d been drafting in her head since she found out Sabrina wanted to do this segment. She’d learned from Lolly and Sparkling that hitting the close right was important, and there was something she wanted to say. Sabrina gestured—okay, right, move to the sofa, sit down, add a little visual interest. Mae did, then spoke.
“There are obviously other reasons my mom has trouble cleaning up after the puppies, and everything else,” Mae said. “She’s working on those. The spaces around us reflect the spaces inside us, and when those things don’t go together, that’s how we know we need to make a change. For my mom, she’s found that as she gets older, she sees what’s really important in life, and now she wants her house