Read The Glass Kitchen for Free Online

eating.” She turned back to her sisters. “I do not like guys who are taken.”
    Portia and Cordelia rolled their eyes.
    “I don’t,” Olivia persisted, reaching up to twist her mass of curls into a loose knot on her head. When she let go, her hair fell in a tumble around her shoulders. “Martin wasn’t taken. Neither was Daniel. And what about George?”
    “True. But let’s see. Martin, you broke up with because he had a cat.”
    “Sue me. I’m a dog person.”
    “Well then, Daniel should have been perfect for you: He had a dog,” Cordelia said. “I can’t remember why you broke up with him, just that you did via text message.”
    “Does anyone under the age of fifty use the word via ?” Olivia shot back. “How old are you really?”
    “You know very well I am”—she glanced at Ariel—“twenty-eight.”
    “Not!” Olivia and Portia laughed. “Thirty-five if you’re a day!”
    “Don’t change the subject,” Cordelia snipped. “We’re not finished. You mentioned George.”
    Olivia shrugged and looked away.
    Cordelia tsked. “Poor George. He would have been better off with a text. He only found out about your change of heart when he came home to your all’s apartment and saw you’d thrown his clothes out the window.”
    Ariel gaped, fork forgotten in her hand.
    “He deserved it,” Olivia stated with calm certainty. “Besides, the apartment was a fifth-floor walk-up. I wasn’t going to spend hours walking up and down those stairs taking everything down to the street. That’s a rite of passage. Every woman should throw a guy’s clothes out a window once in her life.”
    Cordelia scoffed. “A rite of passage is a sorority hazing or a bat mitzvah.”
    “Maybe for you, Miss Marry-the-first-guy-you-date.”
    “I dated!”
    Portia groaned. “Please stop.”
    Olivia and Cordelia ignored her.
    “You only dated one other guy, Cordelia, and that didn’t turn out so well.”
    “What happened?” Ariel asked.
    Without Portia noticing, the girl had dumped everything out of her backpack and had retrieved a notebook. She sat now, poised with pen in hand over an empty page, like a reporter, or overeager detective. Next to her plate, a smorgasbord of paraphernalia littered the table. Several pens of assorted colors, a calculator covered in E = mc 2 stickers, a wild-haired rendering of Einstein painted in fluorescent-green nail polish on an inhaler, a half-eaten KitKat bar, a mini-bottle of antibacterial gel, and multicolored knit socks with separate coverings for each toe, like gloves for feet. Portia loved the socks.
    “What happened to the only other guy you dated?” Ariel persisted, ready to write.
    “Nothing,” the three sisters said in unison, which brought them back together, the energy between them shifting.
    Olivia touched Cordelia’s hand. That was the way with Olivia. Wild and carefree, blazing through anything bad with a bold fearlessness, but underneath a caring that Portia sometimes thought her sister worked hard to hide.
    “Dating practically only one guy has served you well,” Olivia said. “You and James are great together, and you’ll survive whatever is going on now.”
    Cordelia gave her a determined smile. “Thank you, sweetie.”
    They shared a comfortable moment, Portia just barely realizing that Ariel studied them like a scientist scrutinizing a foreign species.
    Olivia didn’t seem to notice at all, lost in her own thoughts, until she wrinkled her nose, then leaned closer. Portia could see the sparkle in her eyes that she knew meant trouble.
    “So it goes without saying that you and James are perfect, yada yada,” Olivia said with another wave of her hand. “But let’s just pretend. If you had dated anyone else before you left Texas, who would it have been? Brody, right? You were madly in love with Brody. You would have slept with—”
    “Olivia!” Portia barked, nodding toward Ariel. “Inappropriate. On so many levels.”
    Olivia just shrugged innocently,