That makes Lilly smile. June has always been too good for any kind of internet detecting, has never known the searing mortification of accidentally liking a post seven weeks back in the feed of an ex’s casual female acquaintance. If she’s stooping to common social media snooping, she must be at least half in love.
“Let me see,” Lilly says. She takes the phone from June’s outstretched hand, squinting at the screen over the top of her sunglasses like her mother pretending not to need readers to decipher the menu in a fancy restaurant. Will’s sister looks like him, a little—all thick dark eyebrows and haughty expression, that same full mouth and arrogant chin. She’s also bonkers pretty, though that doesn’t seem like a particularly helpful thing to point out at this particular juncture.
“Well,” Lilly says at last, her stomach sinking as she scrolls through Caroline’s photo stream. It’s a private account, friends and family only, but even the most candid and casual of the images—Caroline and Charlie drinking wine on some European patio, Charlie and Will grinning on the glossy deck of a boat—reveal a kind of sleek, effortless glamour, the kind of life where it’s always the magic hour and nobody ever gets a poppy seed stuck in their teeth. Even at the height ofMeet the Benedettos, Lilly always knew they would never be the same kind of fancy as people like the Bingleys or the Darcys; still, looking at these pictures she canalmost smell her own family’s desperation sticking to her clothes and hair like red sauce and oregano at the end of a busy restaurant shift. Their money was too new; their clothes were too flashy. Their house wasn’t built to last. “They’re all friends, right? We knew they were all friends.”
The patio door slides open before June can answer. “What are you losers doing?” Olivia wants to know, poking her head out into the yard.
“Stalking Charlie Bingley on social,” Lilly replies—straightening her shoulders, waggling the phone in Olivia’s direction. “Want to help?”
Olivia’s face lights up. “Always,” she says, holding her hand out as she skips happily across the flagstone. “Why didn’t you text me?”
Kit gets home and joins them a little while later, dragging a couple of lounge chairs together to make a bed big enough for them all to sit on; even Mari comes outside in the end, and if she doesn’t exactly help, she doesn’t make disapproving noises and talk about the Patriot Act, either, which is almost the same thing. Looking around at the four of them, listening to the familiar rise and fall of their voices, Lilly feels a quick prickle of shame for betraying them, even if it was only for a minute and only in the most secret part of her heart. Maybe they are a little desperate, herself included. But she’d rather be desperate than cold.
“Is Will still in the house?” Kit asks, leaning her head on Lilly’s shoulder. She’s got Junie’s feet in her lap, Olivia curled up beside them; they used to snuggle like this all the time when they were little girls, though they do it less than they used to. Their dad used to call it a Jersey Turnpike Pileup. “Now that Charlie and Caroline are in New York?”
“He sure is,” Mari says, before Lilly can answer. “All by his lonesome. What?” she asks when they all turn to look at her, something that’s not quite a smile flickering across the pale screen of her face. “I notice things.”
“Evidently,” Lilly says, surprised by the warm flood of relief rushing through her. She’s gotten used to running into him around the neighborhood, she guesses. Probably she’s just sensitive to change. Still, she lets herself imagine him alone in the house for a moment, restless and wakeful. Lets herself imagine knocking softly on his door.
Her own phone pings just then, Nick’s name appearing on the screen:Drinks tonight?he wants to know. Lilly bites her lip, turns her phone facedown on the lounge chair without replying. Tucks the phone underneath her thigh. Not a good person, Will said, and maybe he really does know something scandalous she doesn’t; on the other hand, Will probably doesn’t think she’s a good person, either, and she’s not about to let him ruin a perfectly nice time.
Sure, she types, after pulling the phone out again, her thumb flying over the keyboard.Drinks sound great.
She turns back to her sisters then, watching idly as Olivia peruses the long-dormant Facebook page of Charlie’s high school girlfriend with all the investigative gravitas of Carl Bernstein about to break Watergate. They stay out there, heads ducked close around the glowing screen of June’s phone like a coven of witches consulting an oracle, until the sky turns from blue to black and their mother yells at them all to come inside.
Chapter Seventeen
Kit
“I have news,” Kit announces at Thanksgiving dinner; Cinta put in a catering order, mashed potatoes pooling with butter and stuffing studded with sausage and thyme. Lilly is buttering a dense-looking brick of cornbread while June frowns down at her phone, ignoring her own untouched plate. Mari eschewed the holiday altogether in favor of what she claimed was a two-day poker tournament in Las Vegas, which seemed suspect but not, in all honesty, completely impossible. “I sold two dozen hankies.”
He mother looks at her blankly, reaching for the cranberries. “I don’t know what that means.”
“The ones I’ve been working on,” Kit explains. Probably she should have led with that. “With the embroidery?”
“What, with the swear words on them?” Olivia asks, coming in from the kitchen and flopping down into her seat. “I thought that was just, like, a weird creepy hobby you were doing.”
“I mean, it was, at first,” Kit admits. “But you know Louie Rowes, the boutique in Beverly Hills? A friend of mine is friends with the buyer there and they liked the look of them, so they ordered a bunch.”
“What, to sell?” Her mother frowns.
“Yeah, Mom.” Kit frowns back. “To sell.”
“Perhaps that will be the thing that saves this family, Katrina,” her father says cheerfully, holding his hand out for the tofu. “Snot rags decorated with tiny obscenities. Could be the start of an empire.”
Kit tries not to sag in a way that any of the rest of them will notice. Of course she knows the only one her father has ever taken seriously in their entire lives is Lilly; still, every once in a while she forgets. “Could be,” she echoes, trying to keep her voice playful. “Never know.”
She slips out of the dining room before pie—driving around for a long time listening to the radio, the moon full and heavy overhead. She knows it’s stupid—that she’s never going to have some second act as a serious designer, that in all likelihood she’ll be hawking appetite suppressants on social media for the rest of her life. She’s proud of those hankies, though, their details and their intricate stitching. The quiet zip of her needle and thread.
It’s after midnight by the time she gets back, letting herself into the darkened foyer and padding barefoot up the steps to her room. On her sewing table is an enormous bouquet of flowers, jasmine and peonies, fat and round and fragrant. The card is signed by all four of her sisters but the message is written in Lilly’s familiar scrawl:
Congratulations, you spectacularly bright light, you. The rest of us can’t wait to catch colds.
Kit smiles, glancing out the door and down the hall at the rooms where the rest of them are sleeping, wondering where in theentire city of Los Angeles Lilly found an open florist at nine p.m. on Thanksgiving night. She sits down at the table and plucks a handkerchief from the pile, threads her needle with floss the color of blood:Sister, she embroiders, the quiet of the house all around her.Love.
Chapter Eighteen
Lilly
