had bought the tickets. But Barbara had never admitted it before.
Behind them, the house, and the mess, loomed, as bad as it had ever been and maybe worse. It was spreading over to Mimi’s, and no matter what her mother said about being careful with the pies, that mouse said something different. It was lucky the pies had come from Patrick that week. But if Barbara could even acknowledge that the mess was a problem . . . the teenaged Mae had tried to talk to her mother about it. Of course she had. Why buy one more thing? Why keep it all? Why pile it up higher than Mae’s head, why stack it in bathtubs until only one shower remained functional, why take every orphaned chair or abandoned magazine from the end of every driveway and bring it here to rest?
But Barbara, who was so open to Mae in every other way, shut down at every turn when it came to the house. Mae could beg, she could stand right in Barbara’s face and scream herself hoarse, and Barbara would just wait until she was finished and then walk away. Mae didn’t know if Patti argued with her, didn’t know if their father had ever tried to come back, didn’t know if anyone else had ever tried to do a damn thing, but if they had, it hadn’t helped. Barbara never alluded to the state of the house except to grow angry when challenged about it, but maybe that mouse, and Patches, meant Mae had a chance to get through to Barbara in a way she never could before. Maybe Barbara would listen. Maybe Mae could make this Food Wars thing go away and make things better for Barbara while she was here. And maybe Andy could keep Mimi’s from being sucked under after Mae was gone, if he stuck around. But those were big maybes. As big as, if not bigger than, the one that waited for her back in Brooklyn.
They sat like that, staring out into the darkness, until Barbara broke the silence. “So, what do we have to do?”
Mae looked at her with surprise. She hadn’t said they had to do anything, and she wasn’t at all sure she could go through with Sabrina’s plan, even though it was hard to see any other way out of this.
“For Sabrina,” her mother said impatiently. “Obviously it doesn’t do her any good to just trash things like this. What’s she left with, then—Frannie’s wins on a technicality? That’s crap TV. She must want something.”
“She does.” Mae spoke slowly. “She wants me to help you clean it up.”
“Oh.”
“And not just me, like me your daughter. Mae Moore me. She means Mae Moore, organizational guru.”
“She wants you to make me sparkle, then.”
Mae didn’t know if her mother meant to be funny, but she started to laugh, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. She laughed, and she cried, and she leaned on Barbara, and Patches licked both of their faces, then bounced around them joyfully. Mae’s stomach ached and her cheeks ached and she was covered in snot and tears, and the whole thing felt so bleak and hopeless that she wasn’t sure why she was laughing at all. Barbara didn’t laugh, but Mae could feel the lift of her chest as she smiled.
“Yeah. That’s exactly it. She wants me to make you sparkle, Mom.”
She could hear Aida’s cane thumping toward them, and the door opened. They’d have to tell her what had happened. Mae scrambled up and dusted herself off, then extended a hand to her mother, still on the step, and after a moment Barbara took it.
Barbara’s hand shook in hers, as it had before, and as Mae put another hand on her mother’s elbow (because helping Barbara up wasn’t easy), she realized that the tremor went back through her arm, and that her mother was somehow at once heavy and frail—and different. As she took her mother’s weight, Mae’s sense that something was wrong was so strong that she almost lost her grip, and although she managed to help her mother to her feet, she couldn’t hide her reaction to Barbara’s struggle. This was not the way Mae’s mother was supposed to be. Everything was wrong already, but this was something so much bigger that it hollowed out Mae’s chest, leaving her unable to breathe.
Aida, who in spite of a broken foot was nearly as strong and tough as she had always been, stepped quickly through the