those looked freshly cut. Barbara hadn’t mentioned hiring a cook, which was so unlike her that Mae could hardly wrap her head around it, but at least the guy seemed to have persuaded Barbara to make some changes.
Fifteen disgusting minutes later, Mae was ready for her Food Wars debut. In the kitchen another man, a smaller one, was teaching Madison to spray the dishes and slide them through the commercial dishwasher while Sabrina and her camera looked on, cooing admiration and encouragement. “Thank you, Zeus,” Madison said. “Mommy, look!”
Mae must have looked surprised, because the woman—young, pretty, cheerful—who was doing the serving behind the counter heard her, laughed, and introduced herself. Angelique, she said, and the dishwasher was Zeus. “He’s really Jesús,” she said, pronouncing it the Spanish way, “but the first cook he worked with called him Zeus, and it stuck.”
With a promise that his own French fries were coming, Mae set Ryder up at a picnic table just outside the restaurant door with a coloring sheet, where Mae and Amanda had spent their childhood summers, close to their mother but out of the way. Angelique produced cups of crayons, the cups slightly squished to fit through the slats of the picnic table, just as they always had, and Mae touched the table gently. Same table, exactly. Same smell of crayons in the waxy cup. Possibly even some of the same crayons.
But Sabrina’s presence left no time for nostalgia, even if Mae wanted to feel it. She came over quickly, trailed by Madison and the camera, and leaned over the coloring page as one of her young minions pushed a clipboard at Mae. “Your sister drew that, right, Mae?”
Sabrina knew who Mae was and that she was coming, too, then—and knew her history with Amanda and who knew what else. They were just going to jump right into things. Mae signed the release quickly, not reading it—they were all the same—then looked into the camera. “She did,” Mae said, carefully choosing her words. “Amanda’s always been a good artist.” She wasn’t expecting to talk about Amanda so soon, without a chance to see her sister first. What would Amanda have said about Mae? Had Sabrina talked to Barbara yet? Not for the first time, Mae cursed both the delay and her mother’s and sister’s unwillingness to strategize by text. They could keep the “war” focused on the chicken if everybody would just be smart about it, and they could be. They’d been a team once, she and Amanda, and, yeah, they’d had some rough years, but now was the time to put all that in the past and focus. Damn it, if only she knew what Amanda or Barbara had said.
“It’s funny that you still use that drawing, though,” Sabrina said.
Mae could feel Sabrina pushing slightly, laying her bait. She smiled internally—she was not that easy, and Sabrina ought to know it. “Not really. She painted the sign outside, too.” Amanda’s chickens belonged at Mimi’s. It was hard to imagine one at Frannie’s, although maybe she drew them there, too. Mae looked again at the familiar chicken. Of course. Frannie’s probably had an Amanda-designed coloring page too. She’d just never thought of it before, and she had that feeling you get when you see a friend you’d thought of as unchanging suddenly living a new life. It took her a moment to tune back in to Sabrina.
“Let’s talk about you, though. This is a real homecoming for you, right?”
Mae glanced around. They were going to do this here? Out behind the kitchen, before she had even seen her mother or spent any time in the restaurant? Mae tried to avoid looking around at the space that would be the backdrop for her first appearance in front of all these potential fans and followers, and turned her attention to Sabrina, keeping her shoulders open and addressing the camera trained on them both. “It is. I’m really excited to come home and do some work on the place.”
“Work?”
“Well, spruce it up a little.” She gestured to the nicer of the two weedy strips along the patio, hoping the camera would avoid the other, which featured cracked pots and dead plants, with nothing growing but a fork planted tines down in the dirt. Time to take the focus off their surroundings. “And I’ve been thinking about the menu,” she said, picking one up and hoping the camera would focus in. “It’s simple, but maybe it’s a little too simple.”