The Glass Kitchen (28 page)

There was a long pause. “Tell that to Miranda.”

“She’ll come around.”

He sighed, then stood, taking her hand and drawing her to her feet. “Will she?”

He looked exhausted and ravaged, as if his young daughters could bring him down in a way that multinational conglomerates couldn’t. He might have been ruthless when it came to business, but this man was anything but when it came to Miranda and Ariel. This man loved his girls, but he didn’t know the first thing about how to manage his way through their lives.

Portia reached up and wrapped her arms around him. He leaned over, pulling her into him, burying his face in the crook of her neck. Seconds ticked by before she felt his body ease.

“Thank you,” he whispered into her hair. “Thank you for tonight.”

Finally, he let her go, and together they cleaned up the mess. Downstairs in his kitchen, they worked like two cogs in a wheel. When they finished up in there, she realized that finger sandwiches and cake couldn’t possibly be enough for him to eat.

“Sit,” she told him softly, gently pulling him over to the table. When he tried to pull her to him, take control, she spun away.

He watched her with greedy eyes, greedy for her, greedy for the food, as she made an omelet gooey with melted cheese, bacon on the side, along with thick slices of homemade bread slathered in butter and jam. It was the kind of meal her mother used to make for Daddy when he came home late and exhausted from one of the manual jobs he had managed to drum up. Food that comforted as much as it sustained.

Portia set the plate in front of Gabriel. He looked from the food to her, something deep and nearly overwhelming in his eyes.

“Thank you,” he whispered to her again.

When he picked up the fork and took a bite, she knew that the emotion in his face was about a great deal more than how delicious it tasted. And she realized then that with his mother, his brother, and even his wife, this was a man who had always taken care of everyone else. No one had ever taken care of him.

She remembered the way he had taken her the night before, holding her down, kissing her so intimately. She had expected to feel awkward afterward. Instead, she felt only a flare of slow carnal desire at the memory. And rightness.

She realized something that had been there for a while, but she had been reluctant to admit it, even to herself. She wanted more from him than a secret love affair.

At the thought, she sucked in her breath when images of food hit her. The fried chicken, the sweet jalapeño mustard—the same images that had hit her the first time when he walked toward her on the sidewalk, then again after the first time they made love. Gabriel’s Meal.

Every day it had shimmered just beyond her thoughts, like a heavy pan of sauce simmering on a back burner. The more they made love, she realized, the stronger the image of the meal became. That was what she had been trying so hard not to think about.

Was it a gift? Or a warning? Good news or bad?

She didn’t know.

But if she wanted more from him, more for them, then she would have to find out. She would have to make Gabriel’s Meal.

Twenty-eight

L
IFE, ARIEL KNEW,
often made no sense, a fact that could make even a smart girl want to trade in her brain for an obsession with acne cures and makeup tips. Almost.

Life didn’t hand out easy equations with perfect answers. Instead, there were things like one minute your mom was there, and the next she was gone. One minute your sister was awful, and the next she was nice. But how long before Miranda turned mean again?

The second Ariel figured her dad was asleep, she snuck back upstairs and retrieved the DVDs. Back inside her room, she curled up in her closet and popped one of the discs into her laptop, fast-forwarding to all the scenes with her mom.

There were days when she could hardly remember what her mom looked like—at least, how Mom looked before the accident. What she mostly remembered was the way Mom looked in the car.

Ariel’s stomach hurt at the memory, which never did anyone any good. What’s more, a real shrink should have gotten that. Shouldn’t he know that talking about the accident was massively screwed up and totally a waste of time?

Of course, in all her trying to convince her dad that the guy was a quack, she couldn’t talk about the accident because she had zero interest in letting him or anyone else know that she had to watch her mom die in the car. If Dad knew she had been conscious while it happened, he’d have her locked up for good, figuring she was about to go all
Girl, Interrupted
or something. So she kept quiet. Besides, it would just make him feel worse. That was something she’d figured out since the accident: Why say the stuff that hurt other people? No point.

Sitting in the closet, Ariel started to fall asleep to footage of her own birthday party the year before. But she jolted fully awake when she heard a crash in the entry hall. Sharp voices sounded, coming all the way up the stairs and into her closet. Miranda and her dad.

Ariel focused on the computer screen. “Everything is fine,” she whispered, tracing the lines of her mother’s image as she brought a store-bought cake from the kitchen, birthday candles flickering.

But her father’s voice boomed, making it hard to stay focused on the screen. “Where the hell do you think you’re going, young lady?”

“Out, Dad. I’m going out!”

“Like hell you are!”

Miranda sounded as angry as their father, the truce from earlier swept away like store-bought or even homemade cake scraped from a plate into the trash.

Ariel started to hum. She found another DVD, one they hadn’t watched, and popped it in the computer. She could ignore the fight if she tried hard enough. She would pretend that everything was fine.

She clicked on play and Mom and Miranda flared to life, laughing as they chased each other around the den. Mom was dressed up in a tight red dress that stopped just above her knees, her hair teased and puffy, and her lips painted a darker shade of red. Ariel’s own voice from behind the camera asked where she was going.

Her mom laughed
. “Where am I going?”
She made a big production of considering the question.
“A book party, darling. Yes, one of those book groups where people talk about characters who are happy and lead exciting lives.”

“Is Dad going, too
?
”
Ariel heard herself ask.

For a second, her mom’s smile tightened.
“Dad is busy.”

Mom had put makeup on Miranda, who was in seventh grade back then, and her sister strutted into the frame, primping for the camera.
“I’m fabulous,”
she cooed into the lens.
“Simply fabulous.”

Ariel heard herself snort in the background.

Miranda stuck out her tongue and twirled away.

Pulling the computer closer, Ariel focused on the screen, remembering the details of their old house. The dark hardwood floors, the huge rugs, the fancy furniture. Her mother had liked fancy. Her dad never had.

“All you have to do is pay for it, Gabriel. It’s not like you live in it all that much.”

The memory leaped out from somewhere, jarring Ariel back into watching the DVD. Their old doorbell rang and Ariel watched her mother’s expression change, her laughter gone as she smoothed her dress.

“How do I look, sweetie?”

“Perfect,”
Ariel heard herself say.

In the background of the spinning footage, Miranda raced to the door while her mother stood, waiting.

“Turn that thing off, A.”

But she hadn’t, and Mom had forgotten she was there. Miranda ran back into the room, excited, and suddenly Ariel remembered what had happened next.

Her heart started to pound as Uncle Anthony walked onto the screen, dressed in a sports jacket, blue shirt, and jeans. He stopped when he saw her mom, smiling at her.

“Anthony!”
her mother cried.

Then the footage snapped off. She could remember hitting the power button and going over to say hi.

Uncle Anthony had come in and out of their lives for as long as she could remember. And for as long as she could remember, he made her mom smile and made her dad really mad.

The difficult thing about life was that once you learned things, you couldn’t unlearn them. Like remembering her uncle walking into their house in Montclair. Her uncle loving her mom first, before her dad came along. The date of her parents’ marriage and Miranda’s birthday. It was like her parents had done everything they could to hide the date they got married. Ugh. Her heart thumped in a way that made the back of her eyes hurt and her throat swell.

Suddenly, she heard Miranda flying up the stairs.

“Your acting out stops now, do you hear me?” Dad roared, his voice thrumming through the walls as he followed after her.

“Up yours!” Miranda shrieked back.

“You do not sneak out of this house,” he ground out.

Ariel shut the laptop and pressed her hands to her ears.

“No, no, no,” she whispered. Whispering
no
never did any good, but she did it anyway. Same as she had in the car, lying there with her mom.

The memory made her get to her feet, unsteady at first, before she threw open the door. This time she wasn’t locked down by a seat belt and crumpled metal. This time she could do something. Help, maybe.

She opened the door to her bedroom just in time to see Dad walk by, gripping Miranda by the arm, propelling her toward her bedroom. For a second, she barely recognized her sister. Miranda wore a tight dress that she definitely didn’t buy with Dad in tow, and she held a pair of those super-high heels. The five-inch ones that Miranda would never have been able to walk in. Not that she was going to get a chance to try since Ariel was pretty sure their dad would kill her first. Or lock her away until she was twenty-one.

“You can’t do this! My friends are waiting for me! It’s hard enough to make friends around here without you making it impossible!” Miranda screamed.

Not that Dad listened. He forced Miranda to her room. “What kind of friends are you meeting?” he demanded. “Dressed like that?”

Ariel backed up and closed her door, then ran over to her window that led out to the fire escape. When she pulled it open, cool air struck her face, bringing the sound of the city with it. Ariel clenched her teeth as she stepped out onto the thin metal landing. She hated heights, hated the fire escape, had loved it when her dad had forbidden both her and Miranda from going anywhere near the fire escape. In her nearly thirteen years, Ariel had never completely defied her father. She had left that to Miranda. But the only way she knew how to help was to distract her dad from how mad he was at Miranda. She would make him mad at her.

Clasping her fingers tightly around the railing, ignoring the fear that the metal would disintegrate under her feet, letting her crash into the garden below, making her disappear, Ariel crawled over to her sister’s window. By then, her dad stood inside Miranda’s room lecturing, Miranda screaming back.

Just then the wind gusted and the fire escape swayed, the metal groaning in protest. Ariel’s stomach heaved, and she realized she was acting like an idiot. She leaped up, but her sneaker caught in the metal grating and she fell against her sister’s window.

Faster than she would have thought possible, her dad was across the room. He had never been pretty, not like Uncle Anthony. But now the look on his face was terrifying. For one thing, he didn’t recognize her at first. The minute he did, he wrenched open the window and hauled her inside.

“Oops,” she managed, a smile faltering on her lips. “I guess I’m in trouble now.”

Ariel watched the gears in his head churn, emotion flashing across his face. Miranda was staring at her like she was crazy. Which she probably was.

“Go to your room, Ariel,” her father said. The words seemed to stick in his throat.

“You know how you always think I should talk?” she said instead. “Well, guess what, I’m ready.”

“Go to your room!” he shouted.

He didn’t wait for her to leave. He turned around and went down the stairs without another word.

Ariel stood frozen, hoping he wouldn’t leave the house, leave them. Instead, he slammed the door of his study.

“Are you crazy?” Miranda hissed.

Ariel forced a smile she didn’t feel. “Me? Nah?”

“You did that on purpose.”

“Get caught on the fire escape on purpose? Now
you’re
crazy.”

Miranda looked at her, and suddenly Ariel couldn’t stop herself. “Mir?”

“What?”

“Couldn’t you be a little bit nicer to Dad?”

Miranda’s lips pursed. “Why would I do that? Dad’s an ass.”

“So—so he doesn’t get, like, so mad that he leaves us,” Ariel whispered. “He could just hire someone to deal with us, you know, and go back to work all the time.”

For a second, Miranda looked shocked. Then the hardness returned. “No. I cannot be one bit nicer to Dad, and frankly, if he hired someone to be here with us, all the better. My friends talk all the time how they just have to pay their nannies or help or whoever twenty bucks every time they want to sneak out.” She flopped on her bed, grabbed a pillow, and hugged it tight. “I’m going to pray he hires someone. Anyone’s better than him.”

Ariel bolted out of the room before Miranda could say another hateful word. She didn’t know how to explain that while Miranda might not be a perfect sister, and their family was massively broken, they were all she had left. It was like a punch in the gut to think that Miranda didn’t care one bit what happened to what was left of their sorry family.

*   *   *

Ariel waited an hour past the Vesuvius blowup before she tiptoed downstairs. She was starving. Drama did that. If this family stuff didn’t get fixed soon she’d probably get as fat as a beach ball. Whatever, she told herself. Again.

She had pretty much repeated that word over and over in the last hour. Wasn’t there some sort of three-strikes rule? Crawling out onto the fire escape was her first offense. Two more to go before her dad did something like send her off to boarding school.