done nothing to John Calvin, said nothing about the farm except to her mother, and that hadn’t been bad, even. She’d been thinking of the farm as part of the Mimi’s story, not something to be excised from it. Because the Mimi’s story was killer. The longer she thought about it, the better it got. Mimi’s was a piece of authentic American history, and the original Mimi a heroine, an early feminist. Frannie’s was a copycat, run by men for most of its years and now so far from its origins that it was unrecognizable, with its long menus and the frozen foods truck parking out back once a week. Cheesecake, biscuits, French fries . . . who knew what else they just yanked out of a bag or box and threw into the oven or onto the plate? Would Nancy and Amanda bother to defrost all this chicken, or would they just say the hell with it and steer customers toward meatloaf and burgers?
You don’t even get what Mimi’s is all about, or what it means to carry on a tradition, she silently told her sister. Mae might have left, but she hadn’t forgotten what was important.
Or how to get along in this town. Mae plunged her hands angrily into another chicken. Mae was doing just fine here, at least temporarily. John Calvin and Amanda aside, nobody around here seemed to resent her for leaving or for her sudden return.
In fact, nobody seemed to resent Mae for much of anything. Not for the kinds of things her fellow New Yorkers seemed to resent other humans for just as a matter of standard practice—being in line for coffee, for example, or having children who didn’t walk in a straight line on the sidewalk. And not for other things, either. Living with Jay had felt like such a minefield lately. She had almost felt as though she needed to hide her work, to write her blog posts when he wasn’t looking, remove the evidence of the little scenes she staged for Instagram and Facebook and smuggle herself off to record Sparkling behind his back. At Sparkling, things hadn’t been much better. As much as she hadn’t wanted to admit it, Lolly and the women around her hadn’t been listening to Mae’s ideas for weeks. Again and again, she had found herself organizing a room or a cabinet that didn’t end up in the final shoot.
The result, she was realizing, had been that she had gone home angry or frustrated. Maybe she hadn’t been a whole lot of fun for Jay, either. Or the kids, who seemed to be loving Merinac. She’d sent them with Jessa down to a shallow wading spot on the river today. That would have been a much more pleasant way to get her hands wet. But no. She was here with the chicken baths, and they weren’t even close to done.
Her mother leaned on the counter beside the sink, where they were soaking some of the bags that were closest to defrosted, and closed her eyes. It was physical work, the moving of the chickens and the dumping of the water, and Barbara had not spared herself any of it. And even though she couldn’t figure out how, Mae knew that on some level, her mother and Andy were right: this was somehow her fault.
“You need a break, Mom.” She put a hand on her mother’s broad back. “Why don’t you go back to the house for a while?”
“I didn’t sleep well,” Barbara said. “It’s nothing.”
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong. Just that you could probably use a break. Go check on Aunt Aida. Make sure she’s getting glamorous for tonight.”
Andy, carrying a bucket of chicken pieces, came into the kitchen. “You guys are slowing down,” he said, and Mae glared at him. To her surprise, he seemed to catch on immediately. “Which is fine,” he said, looking at Barbara. “We’re closer to done than it looks, and I just called Zeus to come a little early. We’ll be on to normal prep in about an hour. If Mae helps, we’ll catch up long before the cameras arrive.”
Barbara untied her apron and hung it on its hook. “If we’re that close, I will take a break,” she said. “Mae, don’t forget to leave yourself a little time to clean up. You’re a mess.”
Without looking back, she left the kitchen, and Andy laughed. “She won’t thank us for telling her she looks tired,” he said.