only child was not at all what she’d planned. But this was a little too close to Nancy’s heart, here. “What about you, do you have kids?” Thanks to Wikipedia, she knew the answer, but it seemed weird to admit it.
“God no. This is scarcely the lifestyle for it, and I’m not really cut out for looking after other people. Except my crew, right, Gordo?” Gordo, making adjustments to a tripod in the corner, grunted. He was creating an extraordinarily elaborate setup, with a phone on a small tripod hanging beneath the bigger camera and lights everywhere that he began to turn off and on. Sabrina turned back to Amanda. “So you guys will win this thing, then settle in and make Frannie’s great? Spend the rest of your life here, bring the kids into the business?”
From her tone, Amanda didn’t think Sabrina was impressed. “Well . . .”
“Well? That sounds a little hesitant. Is there maybe more to Amanda Pogociello than fried chicken and the wide-open spaces of the prairie? My parents run a car dealership, and I like cars, but . . .”
Amanda laughed. “Of course there’s more. I love Frannie’s, and I love what I do here, so that really is the plan. But I do other things—” Should she tell Sabrina this? The other woman had moved closer, her face warm and interested. And it was just a hobby, really, not something that would ever get in the way of Frannie’s. “I like to draw.” That sounded so small, I like to draw, and now Amanda felt like she was being disloyal to the thing that filled so much of her free time—sometimes encroaching on time that wasn’t technically free—to the huge canvases that she painted on over and over because she couldn’t afford new ones, to the sketchbooks that served as her diaries, even to the chicken characters that had taken on a life of their own this past year. Those were easiest to describe. “I make these—comic books, I guess you’d call them. Graphic comic books. Not funny, mostly. About chickens.”
“Really?” Sabrina looked interested, and Amanda smiled back at her, glad that they were connecting. “That’s so cool. Is that what you were going to school for?”
Amanda laughed. “No, I was going to do something practical. Like accounting.” “Going to school” was a grandiose phrase for her efforts anyway. She had drifted into classes at the local college just like she drifted into everything else. It was only later, when the kids were little, after their school and her work and dinner and baths and bedtime, with Frank grading papers in the living room, that she’d tried to get a little more serious, always “making a mess” of the kitchen table.
Which led to the late-night arguments about whether they could move to Kansas City—just for a little while, a year or two—where she could take classes, maybe get her own art degree and teach, too. She had even applied to transfer the few credits she had to the college of art and design in Kansas City. She could have commuted, probably. Frank would have come around, would have seen that she could still make their life with the kids and Frannie’s work.
They would have figured it out. They would have. Or if they hadn’t—but no, they would have. But once he was gone, she never responded to the letter inviting her to remain on the wait list and send more of her work, to apply again the next year. Too much, too hard.
“I’m not that good,” she said. “It’s just something I do on the side.”
Sabrina smiled sympathetically. “When you get tired of chicken— I mean, do you get tired of chicken?”
Amanda laughed. She couldn’t help it. When she wanted to throw her Frannie’s uniform across the room, more like. When the smell, the grease, the way the soles of her work shoes always felt just a little slippery no matter what she did, surrounded her and wouldn’t let her go. But she didn’t need to say all that. “I guess,” she said. “It can get a little—the same, all the time. Which is what’s so great about your job. For you, it’s always something new.”
Sabrina looked at her without speaking for a moment, then laughed herself. “I guess so. It’s funny you draw chickens, though. Can I see them? Did you draw any of the chickens on the specials menu? Do you have any sketchbooks with you right now?” She looked searchingly at