The Chicken Sisters - K.J. Dell'Antonia Page 0,124

Amanda behind her, through the kitchen, the counter, seeing nothing, but that sound—it had come from here. She hesitated, looking at Amanda in confusion now. Was someone out there, listening? A car or a person?

There was no one there. But the front door, like the back door, was open, and it was Amanda who walked out first this time, then stopped short, so that Mae careened right into her.

“Oh—” Amanda gave a little gasp, and Mae echoed her, because what had made the sound was obvious now. The sign Kenneth had hung to cover Mae’s bad painting job had fallen, breaking the pot of flowers in front of it before coming to rest flat against the boards of the porch, now covered in potting soil and uprooted impatiens.

Amanda knelt in front of the sign while Mae reached up to where it had hung, embarrassed again by her paint strokes—and now by the emotion that had driven them. She put a hand on the wall where Kenneth had twisted in an eye to hold the hooks on the sign. The screw of the eye had wrenched out, leaving an ugly splintered hole in the wood, and the one on the other side looked even worse.

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