considering a hug, but Barbara leaned back into the kitchen. “Andy? Andy, come on out here. I want you to meet Amanda.”
Okay, that would work. Barbara had never hired anyone to cook for her before, although she always had counter and dishwashing help. From what Amanda had heard around town, the guy was basically some sort of weird charity project for her mother—good-looking (Mary Laura, Frannie’s bartender, had reported she “wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers”) but more than a little down on his luck, which was obvious, because otherwise, why would he be here?
Andy had to duck a little to step out of Mimi’s kitchen back door. He was tall and broad, and he wore an apron over a T-shirt and standard-issue chef’s clogs with shorts, which revealed pale but muscular legs, abundant tattoos (basically a Mary Laura prerequisite), and a lower-arms-only farmer’s tan that had to have been years in the making.
“This is Amanda, huh?” He held out a hand, and his big, warm grip covered Amanda’s smaller hand entirely. He held it an instant too long, looking at her face with curiosity. “The one who can’t come inside?”
“The one who can’t come inside, yes. Amanda, this is Andy.”
Amanda didn’t need any guy’s hand lingering on hers, but she could see his appeal, especially given how few men there were in Merinac whom Amanda and Mary Laura hadn’t known since kindergarten. She’d be willing to bet Andy could see his appeal too, and that he had a long history of making good use of it.
Did Barbara know she’d brought a fox into the henhouse, or maybe, given the lack of employed straight single men in Merinac, the other way around? Amanda couldn’t tell. Her mother’s interest had shifted from her protégé back to Amanda, and Amanda was glad of an excuse to turn her attention away from Andy’s deep brown eyes and their appraising gaze.
“Well, you didn’t come by to meet Andy,” Barbara said, glancing back into the kitchen. The screen door had drifted open, and she reached out to shut it again, firmly. “Or to see me. So what’s on your mind?”
Amanda ignored the jab and plunged in. “I was wondering if you guys—Mom, if you—if you would be in a restaurant competition with Frannie’s. On TV. It’s called Food Wars, and they want to come, you know, kind of see how we compare, judge the chicken. It would be fun, and it’s good for everybody. It doesn’t really matter who wins.”
Andy, who was leaning against the building, smiling generally at them both, probably enjoying an unexpected break in the day’s work, suddenly stood back up. “Oh man, I love Food Wars. They really want to come here? How did you do that?”
Amanda wasn’t sure how to respond. She preferred to think she did not need Andy’s help, and further, she hoped to downplay her own level of instigation, letting her mother assume that somehow, through the magic of the Internet, perhaps, or just magic in general, Food Wars had happened. She hesitated, feeling, as she always did, the presence of the building itself, no longer the comforting refuge it had been when she had painted the large Chicken Mimi’s sign still prominently displayed beside the door. Like her mother, Chicken Mimi’s resented Amanda’s defection and always would, and yet there was still a link that made Amanda feel as if she had both betrayed them completely and somehow never been gone at all. Certainly that was what her sister thought. You can’t even leave right, Mae scoffed, and it was true. Amanda hadn’t even known she was leaving, and God knew she hadn’t gotten far.
Okay, focus. Her mother had just hired Andy—wasn’t that maybe a sign that she, too, was ready for some change? Amanda kept going. “There’s a cash prize, of course. A hundred thousand dollars. For the best chicken.” And a lot of other stuff, but if she made it sound like just the chicken, at least her mother could believe Mimi’s had a shot. “I think a lot of people watch the show.”
Barbara was staring at her, her mouth a little open, her face unreadable. She frowned a little. “So is this something you want to do, then, this Food Wars?”
What to say to that? Generally, the last thing Barbara wanted was to do anything Amanda wanted. But maybe Nancy was right; maybe this was the one thing they could all share. “I just thought we could all use, Frannie’s,