someone else was writing, and even running away from it, as Mae was tempted to do, would be written in, would play out on this stage.
She could take it, if she had to. Andy could take it. But anything Sabrina did besides nothing was going to cost her mother something, and she didn’t really believe Sabrina would do nothing. There would be something. Mae spent all afternoon trying not to imagine what.
Even so, it wasn’t until she saw the Facebook post that she began to realize how much Food Wars could do—or how much of Barbara’s world they could destroy.
* * *
×
The video, posted to the Food Wars Facebook page, started with a confusing image. On closer inspection, Mae saw it was a squirming pile of puppies. Then, as the camera pulled back, Patches, tongue out, looking quite content (as she should; there was a visible pile of dog treats in front of her). And then, as the camera pulled back more . . .
Shit.
Oh shit.
Oh fuck.
As the camera pulled back more, there was the inside of her mother’s house. How? How had they gotten in, without her even knowing? The dog bed turned out to be partly on a sofa and partly on a coffee table pulled up in front of the sofa. The rest of the sofa, and the floor in front of the sofa, was piled with things, with closed boxes and open boxes with rolled paper and tool handles sticking out, stacks of magazines and more paper, clothing on hangers, in dry-cleaning bags, over the tops of boxes and the back of the sofa.
The view changed to the kitchen, to stacks of unwashed dishes next to equally filthy pans next to new sets of pans and Tupperware, still in boxes, with open cereal boxes on top of them, and on the floor, still more. As Mae stared, horrified, the camera zoomed in on the bottom of a fifty-pound bag of flour, clearly chewed through, and—Goddamn it, how had the cameraperson gotten so lucky?—a mouse skittered out and disappeared under a nearby pile of coats.
She read the post above the video: Is this what you want when you go grab some fried chicken? Turns out someone in this Food War has more than a little problem. Can über-organizer Mae Moore clean up anyone’s act, especially when the mess hits close to home? Find out on tomorrow’s mini webisode of Season Four, Round Three of GHTV’s Food Wars.
There were comments. Hundreds already, still coming. At first, mystified—What is this, whose house is it?—then, of course, as people figured it out, as locals weighed in on what she’d always known was an ugly open secret in their small town, exactly the disgust you’d expect. She runs a restaurant? Makes the pies there? Gross!
Not everybody loved Mimi’s, or at least, as she had always known, some people were happy to hit anyone who was down.
There was even an extensive thread about the dog. How can anyone raise puppies like that? That can’t be safe for the animals! Someone get those puppies out of there! I hope you called the ASPCA before you even took this video, shame on you if you didn’t I will take the dog and the puppies when they are taken away please message me ASAP
And so on.
Mae closed her phone, then, unsatisfied, opened it again, intending to turn it all the way off, to lock it in the glove compartment, to leave it behind completely, except that now there was a message, dropped down over red notifications lighting up the little gleaming icons of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, as if to shout over them all.
Really? This is who you are now, an episode of Hoarders? You’re going to exploit some poor hick’s mental illness for your fame or whatever? Come on, Mae. You’re better than that. Don’t let them drag you down.
She had thought she’d braced herself for this, but she hadn’t. The text was a punch to the gut, one Jay must have fired off before even reading the comments, because it wouldn’t take more than a quick skim to realize that Food Wars was hardly what was dragging her down. He must have seen by now that the “poor hick” was Barbara. He would know that the Mae he had married was, at least in part, a lie, that she wasn’t the solid other half she had pretended to be.