The Glass Kitchen (31 page)

“Shhh!” Miranda whispered, with another giggle.

“I’m being quiet. You’re the one making all the noise.”

Dustin. Ariel realized that Miranda was giving in to the guy. She was going to have sex, right there in their house, their dad somewhere downstairs, probably in his study.

Her legs started jiggling again as she heard Miranda’s door click shut, then louder, muffled giggling. She fell back on the mattress and planted the pillow over her head.

Minutes ticked by. A muffled quiet. Slowly, Ariel started to breathe again and she pulled the pillow away. She hated to think what the silence meant.

But then something worse happened.

“Miranda?”

Ariel gasped, and leaped off the bed and raced to her door, flinging it open. But it was too late.

Her dad stood in front of her sister’s closed door. “Miranda, open this door right now.”

“Go away!”

Dad grabbed the door handle, but it was locked. He pounded on the hard wood. “Open this door,” he demanded, banging on the door.

“No! I hate you! You ruin everything!”

Dad didn’t wait another second. He was a big guy, strong. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when he rammed his shoulder into the door and it crashed open.

It looked like the movies, the sound awful, like a huge, splintering crack that went straight to Ariel’s gut. She could hardly believe what she was watching. What had happened to her normal family?

“What in the hell is going on here?”

“Whoa, dude!”

“Don’t you
fucking ‘dude’
me, you degenerate. Get the hell away from my daughter.”

“Dad! This is my room! You can’t just barge in here!”

“I am your father. You will do what I say!”

Ariel figured her dad must be looking way scary, because the next thing she knew, Dustin was dashing down the hall, pulling on his shirt, his belt unbuckled. She felt even sicker now.

“I hate you!” Miranda shouted the words so loud that Ariel could practically hear her spit.

“So you said!” Dad bellowed back.

Then he pulled a deep breath. “Damn it, Miranda. What do you think you’re doing? You’re barely sixteen years old.”

“Dustin loves me! And I love him!”

“
Dustin
is a hormonal asshole who just wants to get laid!”

Ariel squeezed her eyes shut. Who was the man shouting like that? How could that guy be her dad?

“Oh, really?” Miranda spat. “You know that from experience?”

“I am trying,” their father stated, his voice cold and angry. “I have put up with your antics. I have put up with your sarcasm. I have put up with you talking back. But I’ve had it.”

“Have you?” Miranda sneered. “Well, guess what? I’ve had it, too! If Mom were here, she’d want me to have a boyfriend.”

“Your mother isn’t here! And you sneaking a boy into this house to … to … do—”

“Do what, Dad?” Miranda scoffed. “Fuck? Like you and Portia?”

Silence. A great big painful silence.

Dad and Portia? Ariel felt light-headed. She remembered what Uncle Anthony had said. She didn’t know why, but she thought she was going to throw up.

“Like I didn’t know,” Miranda spat.

It seemed like forever before her dad said, “You are grounded.”

“Great, there’s an original response,
Dad.
But I’d think you’d have a bigger bag of tricks than that. You think grounding me will keep me away from Dustin? I love him! You wouldn’t understand love. I know more than you think about you and love!”

Ariel jumped back as their dad slammed out of the room, then hammered his way downstairs.

The only thing left in the hall was part of the door panel and the shiny brass doorknob that had rolled out of Miranda’s room like Humpty Dumpty after the fall.

Thirty-four

P
ORTIA WAS VAGUELY AWARE
that morning had finally come. She had spent the whole night cleaning up the disarray of pots and pans. The city inspector was long gone. But he’d left her with a general citation. Plus, he reeled off the list of things he could and would cite her for if she didn’t cease and desist immediately—everything from improper sanitation to a ten-thousand-dollar fine for illegal posting of a sign. After her head stopped reeling, with tears streaming down her face, she had ripped The Glass Kitchen sign out of the window.

No matter how she looked at it, the testing version of The Glass Kitchen was over.

Portia dropped into one of the ancient living room chairs and thought of the last meal she had made for her grandmother, a meal for just one person. When Gram had seen it, she’d been shocked. But after long minutes she had pulled a deep breath.

“It’s your time now, Portia,”
Gram had said.
“It’s your legacy.”

“Gram, I just cook! You’re the one people come to see. You give them advice. You tell them the kinds of food that will restore them. You are
The Glass Kitchen
.”

Gram had looked at her for an eternity, seeming to consider. Then finally: “My sweet Portia. I lost the knowing years ago. I woke up one morning and it was gone. I didn’t want to believe it, and I kept cooking, trying to pretend it wasn’t true. But the Kitchen began to fail. Nothing I cooked was right. When I still had the knowing, no one gave a thought as to why they were drawn here, because they always left sated, with answers, with calm.

“Even after the food started to fail, they continued to come since by then I was famous. But once they started leaving unsatisfied, they had to find a way to explain why they were drawn to me, to my food, in the first place. Suddenly answers mattered. As people do, they found excuses. That’s when people started calling me crazy.

“Ever since the day your knowing found Olivia, the day your mother brought you to me, I told myself I needed to teach you the ways. But,” she hesitated, “I couldn’t do it. I told myself that it was because I wanted you to have a normal life. Truth to tell, I didn’t want to share the spotlight. That’s why I didn’t help you develop the knowing. Only when I realized that I had lost mine did I accept that I needed you to save The Glass Kitchen. To save me. If you knew what to cook and bake, I’d know what the people needed to be told to find their calm. So I brought you into the kitchen in earnest then, but to cook, only to cook. Still not teaching you. But you developed the knowing anyway, more powerfully even than me.

“But none of that matters now. It’s your time to do it all, Portia. I know you’re tired of not being set free to explore. And you’ve shown me by making this meal. Making it for one.”

“Gram, I don’t want to do this without you! That’s not why I made the meal for one.”

Then why had she made the meal for one? Why had she known what to prepare, how to set the table? Deep down, she had wanted to fly.

“Hush, child,”
Gram had said.

Then she had walked out into that Texas storm, shocking Portia.

She had married Robert and suppressed the knowing, as if that could keep her guilt at bay.

But marriage to Robert had failed. If she was truthful, deep down she had wanted more. She had wanted a Glass Kitchen. She had wanted passion. She had wanted to fly, just as Gram had said.

Portia’s head fell back, and a word escaped her mouth that was, frankly, blasphemous. After her failed marriage, she had thought she had found passion and a Glass Kitchen in New York. But that had all been a lie as well.

She went to the closet and pulled out the two suitcases she had put away, throwing the few things she had brought with her from Texas back inside. This wasn’t her home. She should have understood that the moment Gabriel Kane had first seen her in the apartment and demanded to know why she was there.

But the most humiliating thing of all? He must not have told her because he had wanted her. She had seen the way he looked at her from the very first time. The heat. The desire. And he was nothing if not a man who got what he wanted.

She had slept her way into free rent.

She bit her lip savagely for a moment before she had the tears under control. She refused, absolutely refused, to cry. If she started, she might never stop—not with the gut-wrenching pain of Robert’s betrayal mixed together with that of Gabriel, whom she had thought was different.

Her cell phone rang, and Cordelia’s number popped up. Portia had to figure out what to do next, but she couldn’t do that at either sister’s apartment.

Thoughts of chocolate drifted through her head. She tasted it, smelled it. She pressed ignore on the phone as it occurred to her where she might go.

*   *   *

Twenty-four hours later, her cell phone was still ringing every time she turned around. Cordelia, Olivia. Gabriel. Everyone wanted to know where she had gone.

This time, it was Cordelia, her fifth call in an hour. Portia turned back to the TV.

“How can you watch that garbage?”

She ignored the question, though she shot her hosts a half smile. “You know,” she said, “Texas hair gets a bad rap for being big. But it has nothing on New Jersey hair.” Portia took a particularly unladylike bite of a Little Debbie cake, her words muffled by the premade pastry. “Not a thing.”

“I guess they didn’t teach you manners in Texas when they were teaching you how to do hair?”

Portia swallowed and glanced over. “Seriously, Stan, have you tasted these things? They’re amazing.”

Stanley rolled his eyes, shuffled over, and sat in the chair next to her. “How long do you plan on staying here?”

“You said I could stay as long as I liked.”

“No, Marcus said you could stay as long as you like. The only reason I didn’t slam the door in your face when you showed up like a half-drowned cat in a storm was because I felt indebted after those chocolate nuts you gave me.” He sniffed. “Lucky for you, you showed up when I was experiencing a moment of weakness.”

Portia shot him a dark grin. “You better work on your gruff thing. A person only has to know you for more than a minute to realize you’re a softie.”

Marcus strode into the room. “He’s a mean old man, don’t let him fool you.” But he leaned down and kissed Stanley on the top of his head.

A twist of yearning hit Portia’s gut at the sight of two people committed to each other for so many years. That was what she had wanted out of life: a partner who knew all her traits, good and bad, and loved her anyway.

She unwrapped another cake in a crackle of clear plastic, then took a giant bite.

Stanley scoffed. “Where’s the woman who made all those chocolate nuts and figs? The one who cooked and baked, the one who went on and on with all her talk about the joy to be found in food.”

Portia raised the half-eaten prefabricated cake in the air. “Don’t know her, never met her. But if I did, I’d tell her to stuff a Little Debbie cake in her obnoxiously cheerful face. And, really, you can’t be tired of me yet.”

“I’m hiding the Hostess Sno Balls,” Stanley grumbled.

Marcus laughed.

After Stanley and Marcus went back to the kitchen, Portia slouched lower in her seat. Stanley was right. She had hardly moved from her spot in front of the television. For all her pull-herself-up-by-the-bootstraps pep talk about fixing her life, she didn’t have the first clue how to do it. So she hadn’t. For the first time ever, Portia was just sitting around and feeling sorry for herself.

Even in Texas, when everything had gone to hell in a handbasket, she had been proactive. Sure, she had fled. But she had actively fled.

Right now, all she wanted to do was flip through cable stations until she found yet another show filled with people who probably couldn’t spell
kitchen
much less know what to do in one.

And she refused to feel one bit guilty about it.

Thirty-five

P
ORTIA WAS GONE
. Vanished.

For three whole days, Ariel listened and watched as her dad tramped up and down the stairs to Portia’s apartment. Every time he returned back upstairs he still didn’t have any idea where she was. For all three of those days, Ariel tucked in her shirt, folded her ankle socks neatly around her ankles, brushed her hair, and even wore a headband she thought her dad would like. Like that would help.

He only looked at her oddly, and didn’t say a word. He also didn’t say a word about their missing neighbor.

She even tried to get him to talk about it, doing her best Shrink Speak, but finally he snapped, “That’s enough, Ariel. She’s gone.”

Anyone who didn’t know him would have sworn he couldn’t have cared less. But Ariel knew better. She knew he was hurting. Her dad dealt with stuff just like she did, swallowing it back, not letting on. It was one of the ways that she and her dad were exactly alike.

Plus, every night he went down the fire escape like a lovesick burglar. Of course he didn’t stay down there long, because really, what was there to find?

The problem was that unless her dad went out and found her, Portia wasn’t coming back. And there was no sign that he was planning to do that.

It was getting her worried. What if he didn’t get the Portia Problem fixed? She’d have to do it for him.

But she had promised to be a good daughter and let him fix things. So she continued to tuck in her shirt and worked hard to smile and be polite. Being a perfect daughter was proving even more difficult than her genealogy report.

But on the fourth day, she’d had it. She woke up knowing that her dad wasn’t going to get the job done. Here she was being, like, so perfect, and what good was that doing?

She started thinking, taking notes in her journal, figured things out. With a start she realized that she was doing perfect wrong! She needed to do the kind of perfect Mother Teresa did, and based on every photo she had seen, Mother Teresa didn’t worry about tucking in her blouse. She was out there doing, helping, mucking around doing the dirty work. If it had been up to Mother Teresa, she would be out helping Dad right along with the lepers! She wouldn’t sit on the sidelines!

As quietly she could, Ariel sneaked downstairs to Portia’s apartment, using the key Portia kept hidden under the mat, regardless of the fact that Dad always did the whole growling thing whenever something came up about it. Once inside, she walked from room to room, looking for a clue.