any excuse to go snooping around, you hear me? If they think I can’t manage, and bring in social, they’ll take you two away. Is that what you want? Is it? Because that’s what you did, when you let him in.”
Patti ran back in without the broom.
“They don’t know, Barbara. Stop.”
Mae stared at her mother, trying to understand. Barbara walked right through the glass and put her hand under Mae’s chin, talking straight into her face. “Now it’s clean, and it will stay that way, but if you tell anyone it wasn’t, or that I left you alone here, that gives them a way in, do you see? People think a woman alone can’t do anything, and just because we don’t have money, because I need to work and I can’t be spending all my time making it pretty around here, they think they can run right over me and get what they want, and what they want is to get us out of here, pave this place over, turn it into a parking lot or something. And we are not going to let that happen.”
Mae nodded, and Patti said, “Barbara. You’re scaring her. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
“I told you what Mary Cat said,” said Barbara. “If they make that mortgage due—”
“They won’t. There’s no reason to.”
“They could take it all away, Patti. And we—the girls and me—”
Mae was scared. Who would take what away? What had she done?
“It’s okay, Mae,” said Patti, but Mae didn’t believe her. She didn’t believe anyone but her mother, and her mother did not look okay.
Mae crawled over the counter and off on the other side, away from the broken glass.
She picked up the broom and took the dustpan in her other hand. “I can make it pretty, Mama,” she offered. “While you work.”
It took years for Mae to realize that she could not keep that promise no matter how hard she tried. Her father had never returned, at least as far as she knew. “Dead of his drinking, and good riddance,” her mother said a few years later, when she asked, and Mae couldn’t find the energy to care. Frank Pogociello came around a few more times, knocking, and even left papers taped to the door, which were the only things Mae ever saw her mother manage to throw away.
The house, though, reverted to its previous state within a matter of months. Twice more, Barbara’s friends, and later Mae and Amanda, took the house all the way back down to the bones, and twice more it returned to chaos. Entropy happened fast on Barbara’s watch, and as Mae stood outside the house now, she understood that it had been a long time since anyone had tried to stop it. She had no intention of trying. Her only involvement with her mother’s house on this trip would be to prevent Food Wars from coming anywhere near the place.
From somewhere behind her she heard a car door slam, and she took off at a run, thinking it was Madison or Ryder. But when she reached the edge of the house, she saw taillights turning out of the parking lot. Amanda and Andy, then, leaving, faster than she would have expected. She’d have to find Amanda in the morning. Barbara too. Damn.
It was late, but Mae felt restless. Time to make things happen. She yanked out her phone and texted her sister as she walked. Didn’t want to interrupt you and Andy. Slick moves, chick. Meet me after your school drop-off. We need to make a plan.
The back door of Mimi’s hung open, and as she reached in to shut it, she felt the gloom wrap around her in a way that it had not when Andy, Angelique, and Zeus were bustling around. The whole place spoke to Mae of decay and despair, and always had, in spite of the bright yellow paint. The first Mimi had started it not out of a burning desire to share her family chicken recipe but out of desperation when money first got tight, and it never loosened up. In the picture that had always hung on the wall she looked pinched and worried, and she was no happier in a later picture with the two daughters who would become Mary Cat and Mary Margaret, the second Mimi, the old ladies of Mae’s childhood.
Enough Mimis, enough memories. Mae spun around, away from the picture, waving her arms to stir things up as she went. Clearly it was