muffins, which is fine. Saturday I’ll fry them doughnuts and be the greatest thing ever for about ten minutes. Now, let’s hear it.” She patted the bench beside her. “I’ve had my coffee. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
AMANDA
Ordinarily, Amanda hated going home to her empty house while the kids were at school. If she wasn’t working the lunch shift, she went anywhere else: Patrick and Kenneth’s, Nancy’s, Walmart. She volunteered, becoming the de facto art teacher for the elementary school, where the teacher provided by the district (who also taught at the middle and high schools) could only get there once a week. She took her sketchbooks and sat on benches and at picnic tables when the weather was warm. Anything to avoid the mess, which never reached Barbara level but still made her feel defeated inside. And the silence. Mostly the silence.
But after seeing Mae, she couldn’t go anywhere but home. The tears that had overwhelmed her when she saw their fallen tree were threatening to become an all-day affair, and she needed the privacy of her tiny house to pull herself back from the sense that it wasn’t just the tree that was being torn from its roots.
Mae was so totally not cleaning her fucking kitchen. The last time Amanda saw Mae was here, in her little kitchen, two days after Frank’s funeral. Mae was already packed, already heading home, basically gone, but she stopped in for one last assault on Amanda’s entire life. Sitting at the kitchen table, organizing sympathy cards into neat rows, asking—no, demanding—to know what Amanda’s plan was now. “Action is the best cure for anxiety,” Mae declared, hopping up to straighten Amanda’s counters. In her mind, Amanda, in a burst of fury, had swept everything, cards, blender, toaster, coffee cups, off every surface, raging at her sister that this wasn’t anxiety, it was horror, it was a shit show, it was the impossible meeting the unbearable and crashing into the unthinkable and Mae had no idea, none . . .
In reality she’d done no such thing. She’d sat and stared down at the linoleum and muttered something, wanting Mae to leave or at least to stop acting like Amanda’s grief was some sort of offense against Mae herself.
Mae had knelt in front of her, pregnant belly dangling, and grabbed both of Amanda’s hands. “Come to New York,” she said. “We’ll find a place out of the city, where we can afford it, you and me and Jay, with the kids, find you work, get you back into school—help you start again. I know this is terrible, but you’ll get through it. You just need a plan.”
Amanda shook her head. Frankie, then barely eight, wandered into the kitchen, and Mae reached out and pulled her over. “Frankie, you want to come live with Auntie Mae, right? And Mommy?”
Frankie, still a little bashful, leaned into Amanda and didn’t say anything. Amanda held her daughter close, pressing the little head into her own chest and glaring at Mae. “You don’t just do that,” she said. “Just—no. Don’t ask the kids stuff like that. We can’t— We’re fine, Mae. Fine without you.”
Mae didn’t get what it was like to be her. She never had, and she never would. Amanda’s kitchen was fine. She was fine. Amanda dropped her tote bag on the floor, and Mae’s talking points slid out. We’re close but we have our own lives! Amanda snatched the paper off the floor and crumpled it up, quickly, then pushed it deep into the trash.
There. She’d cleaned.
She cleared a space on the table, dumping the breakfast dishes in the sink with the plates from last night’s pizza, and turned her back on the kitchen, on the boxes and the curled, ripped tabs from past frozen dinners, on the bottles waiting to be rinsed and recycled, on Pickle’s bowls, still under the counter, on everything that wasn’t right with her world. She sat down with her latest sketchbook, mashing it open angrily on the table. She felt better the minute she had the pencil in her hand, and a chicken chased by a tornado began to take shape on the page, rough and running for a coop that was obviously in the path of the wind.
You don’t grow up in a small town as “the kid who can draw” without ending up with requests, and as a result, one variety of Amanda’s chickens—she thought of them as the friendly biddies—was scattered all over town. She