Those words—“your own show”—froze Mae mid–anxious pacing, tagging some region of her brain that had been waiting to hear exactly that and twisting all her thoughts up as if someone had pulled a knot tight. Everything else was so wrong, but that felt so right—
“I’ve set you up, Mae. You’re going to make this happen. You clean your mom’s place up, get it straightened out, and the whole world will be watching. This has everything people love. Family, a little fighting, a daughter coming through for her mother, puppies . . . You do your thing, then we do ours—announce the winner, call it done—and you’ll be able to write your own ticket with whatever network you want. Organizing, food, country living—you’ve got all the pieces, and you were made for television. Everyone will want you.”
Sabrina had no idea what she was asking. “I can’t fix my mom,” Mae said. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? It won’t work.” Mae remembered what she had been planning to say. “And you guys—you snuck in! Or somebody did! Someone entered the house, and nobody let them in. My mom is going to call the police.”
“Door was open, Mae. Our cameraman heard the dogs—they might have been in trouble. He’s a Good Samaritan. And nobody’s going to care anyway. They care about the dogs, and they’ll care about the pies, and the mice. That’s what the story is.”
“She didn’t make the pies in there,” Mae said, trying a different tack. “Patrick, from the coffee shop, made the pies that were on the show.”
“Details,” declared Sabrina cheerfully. “You’re just complicating things, and no one will pay attention. Maybe that will save you from some food inspector—although there’s no way it hasn’t been that way when she was making pies and you know it—but it’s not going to help you on Facebook.”
Mae could hear the truth in Sabrina’s words. No one would care. She’d seen those comments. Mimi’s had done okay tonight, probably could stagger along, but this was out there now, whether Mae wanted to accept it or not.
“Maybe we’re done,” she told Sabrina, hearing the weakness in her own voice. “Maybe my mom doesn’t want anyone in her house. She’ll just shut Food Wars down.”
“No, she won’t,” Sabrina said. “She’s going to have protestors trying to protect those dogs if she doesn’t do something, to say nothing of the damage to Mimi’s. You guys are going to have to clean it up, and you’re going to have to clean it up big, so people can see it happening. If you don’t, your mom loses her dogs for sure, and maybe her business, too. You don’t want that, Mae, and this is what you do. You can make this better, and it will be a triumph!”
“It’s not that simple, Sabrina.” Mae wanted to grab the other woman through the phone and shake her. “It’s an illness. She can’t help it, and I can’t help her.” It was what she had been repeating to herself for years, the phrase she had made her peace around. Her mother couldn’t change, and Mae couldn’t do it for her.
She could practically see Sabrina rolling her eyes. “I don’t care if you fix her forever, Mae. Fix her now. Clean it now. Make a pretty, sparkly place for those puppies now, and paint the whole thing over with glitter and rainbows, and it doesn’t matter what it looks like in six months. You’ll be gone and I’ll be gone and as long as your mom doesn’t kill anybody with her cooking it will all be good. This is a big opportunity, and you’re going to grab it, Mae. And I’m going to film it.”
Mae didn’t answer her. She didn’t have an answer. She couldn’t even think about the show or the cameras or any of that. She looked at the phone, with Sabrina waiting inside—and the video, and Facebook and Instagram and all of it—and pressed the red button to end the call, then slowly put the thing into the back pocket of her jeans shorts. She should go to the motel, probably. Madison and Ryder had been in rare form when Jessa hauled them out of Mimi’s at close, hours past their bedtime, and Mae had paid very little attention to what the cameras were capturing. Jay was right; she had brought her children out here to be a sideshow. She had made her whole life a sideshow. Maybe if she went