“Eat me?” Chloe asked.
“If I have to eat one more greased up, heart-attack-on-a-plate meal from that place,” Tara said from flat on her back, “I’m going to kill myself. I’m cooking.”
“Finally,” Chloe said with relief. “What took so long?”
“I don’t do it for people I don’t like.”
“But sugar, you don’t like anyone.”
Maddie shook her head at Chloe, then looked at Tara.
“It’s more that I’ve decided I don’t not like you,” Tara said.
Even flat on her back and sweaty, Tara exuded confidence. Maddie flopped down and sighed. She’d been working on her own confidence, but even faking it, it was still hard to go toe-to-toe with her sisters.
Half an hour later, Tara had food spread in front of her sisters that blew Maddie’s mind. Blueberry wheat pancakes, egg-white omelets, turkey bacon, and fresh orange juice.
“Not a river of grease in sight,” Tara said. “Chloe, stop wrinkling your brow or your face will stick like that.”
“I don’t like wheat pancakes-they taste like dirt.” But she took a bite, chewed, then shrugged. “Okay, never mind. These don’t taste like dirt.”
“I don’t give a flip,” Tara said, mixing up more batter.
“Well, flip this,” Chloe said and gave her oldest sister a middle finger.
“No, that’s what I call them-‘I Don’t Give a Flip’ Pancakes. I could make peace on earth with those pancakes.”
“You should really work on that self-esteem issue you have,” Chloe said dryly, gathering ingredients of her own into a bowl-almonds, jojoba oil. “Making a cracked-heel treatment today. Because Maddie’s feet need help.”
“Hey,” Maddie said.
“You keep rubbing those babies against my legs at night, and it hurts. And,” Chloe said, looking at Maddie’s plate and the way she’d carefully arranged her food, nothing touching, “you’re a freak.”
Maddie looked at her large plate of food and tried not to get defensive and failed. “I’m hungry. I just burned a million calories doing yoga.”
“The way you do it? Not quite. And I was talking about how you’re trying to keep your syrup off your eggs, not about how much food you have on your plate.”
“I don’t like my foods touching.”
“Like I said… freak.”
“Hey, I don’t mock you.”
“What’s to mock? I’m normal.” Chloe began whisking up the ingredients in her bowl for her balm, or whatever it was. “Oh, and I know I told you I was leaving tomorrow, but good news. I’m not leaving for two days, because my thing got pushed back.”
“Yay for us,” Tara said dryly.
Chloe ignored her. “First up is New Mexico, and then I’m thinking about going to meet a friend in Houston, who’s interested in buying some of my recipes.” With a sly look in Maddie’s direction, Chloe set down her whisk to turn to her plate, where she purposely mixed her eggs with her pancakes, smeared it all in syrup, then dipped a huge bite… into her orange juice. Watching Maddie squirm, she sucked it into her mouth, making “mmmmmm” noises.
Maddie couldn’t even watch. “You’re disgusting.”
Chloe just moaned in pleasure. “This is damn good food. Boggling really.”
“Why is it boggling that I cook well?” Tara asked in a tone that had the air around them going frosty.
“First off, you don’t cook ‘well,’ you cook amazing, and it’s boggling because I thought I was the only one who got Mom’s artistic streak. Not to mention that people who can cook are usually more outgoing and friendly than you are, and-”
“And,” Maddie said, quickly jumping in because she’d learned that was the best way to keep things from escalating, “you just don’t seem like the cooking type.”
Ignoring Maddie, Tara narrowed her eyes at Chloe. “Finish your sentence.”
“Are these blueberries fresh?” Maddie asked desperately. “Cuz they taste fresh.”
“You seriously think that you’re the only one who got anything from Mom?” Tara asked Chloe.
“I know I’m the only one who liked her.”
“You didn’t even know her, not really!”
“And the orange juice,” Maddie interjected into the very tense room. Her first instinct was to find a hole to crawl into. Her second was to grab her knitting, which she’d discovered was not only a sentimental escape, but was also a great relaxation technique. Better than chips. Problem was, she couldn’t look away from the impending train wreck. “The orange juice is amazing, Tara. How did you get out all the pulp?”
“I knew her better than you,” Chloe said to Tara. “At least I called her.”
“I called.” Tara’s voice was pure South, dripping with fury. “She screened me!”
“Well, maybe there was a reason.”
“Like what?”
“Like maybe because you’re controlling and anal and a b-”
Tara slammed her hands down on the counter.
Maddie nearly leapt out of her skin, and her elbow hit Chloe’s bowl of… whatever concoction she’d been making. The contents flew out, splattering across Tara’s face.
After a horrendous, thundering beat of silence, Tara scraped herself clean and glared at Chloe. “This is because I asked you to leave my house when you visited me for Easter last year.”
”Hey, it’s Maddie’s elbow that got you all covered in liquid, not me.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Maddie said, gaping at the goop dripping off Tara’s nose. Maddie had some of Chloe’s foot balm on her, as well, but she didn’t look at it because she had a burning question. “And how come I never got an Easter invite?”
“You were somewhere on a movie set, I think,” Tara said. “This year I’ll ask you instead of her, believe me.”
“And you didn’t ask me to leave,” Chloe said. “You kicked me out. Because your husband’s friend kissed me!”
Tara was holding a ladle full of pancake batter, and she pointed it violently in Chloe’s direction. “He was my friend, too. And you kissed him!”
Chloe jumped to her feet. “I knew you didn’t believe me!”
Tara tossed her plate into the sink with enough violence to splash soapy dishwater all over Maddie.
“Great!” Maddie said, pulling her shirt away from her skin with a suction sound.
“I’m done talking,” Tara informed them loftily, which was hard to pull off with some balm on her face, but she managed.
“Good tactic,” Chloe said. “Ignore all your problems-because that seems to be working out so well for you.”
Maddie stood up. Quiet strength, she told herself. Just project quiet strength, like… Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich. Okay, so Erin wasn’t always quiet in her strength, and you know what? She didn’t have to be, either. So with a deep breath, Maddie said, “Shut up.”
Both sisters stared at her.
“We all know what we’re really tense about.”
The inn. How the final vote between the three of them would go. What would happen… With a sigh, she picked up her knitting instead of inhaling any more food and continued from where she’d left off last night. “In, wrap around,” she said to herself. “Pull out.”
“You know,” Chloe said, licking some batter off her thumb. “The way you knit always sounds a little dirty. I bet if you knitted in earshot of a guy, you’d get laid for sure.”
Tara was tossing breakfast dishes into the running sink, each harder than the last, if that was possible.
Chloe responded by cranking up her music via her iPod Touch parked in the dock on the counter. Hip-hop thumped out of the speakers. Tara hated hip-hop, and her head whipped around like the possessed victim in a horror flick.