She pushes Will’s face from her mind and crawls under the covers, stares at the sliver of moon hanging in the purple sky outside the window. She doesn’t fall asleep for a long time.
Chapter Nineteen
Charlie
For the record: he definitely doesn’t ghost Juneintentionally.
He just gets so busy. Which, okay, sounds like a bullshit excuse, and truthfully it is kind of a bullshit excuse, but also, it’s true! It’s true. Who is busier than him right now? Well, the president, probably. Maybe the head of Sony Pictures. But after that: Charlie Bingley, who is appearing on three different magazine covers and four network talk shows this week alone, and who held his pee for four straight hours yesterday afternoon because Caroline was in meetings and in her absence he didn’t know who to ask for permission to go to the bathroom, is the most overexposed person in Hollywood. It says so right there on the Sinclair.
Anyway, he leaves for New York fully intending to text June when he gets there, but then it’s a circus and every time he remembers there’s a reason he can’t do it in the moment—one time Caroline is holding his phone in her purse while he does a photo shoot forVanity Fairin a vintage Camaro; another time he’s snorting cocaine off a conference table with the head writer ofSNL—and then suddenly it’s four days later and the whole thing stops feeling quite so urgent, the memory of her muffled from three thousand miles away. This happens to Charlie sometimes, though he doesn’t like to admit it: a certain kind of distractibility, like that fish fromFinding Nemo. A habit of accidentally forgetting whatever isn’t right in front of his face.
Still, he’s going to call her. Tomorrow, probably. If not, definitely the day after that.
And in the meantime—
“Charlie,” Caroline says, her hand whisper-light on his shoulder, “there’s somebody I want you to meet.”
Chapter Twenty
Lilly
Her head is still jangling when she wakes up the following morning, so she laces up her sneakers and takes herself for a long, rambling walk to the Topanga Canyon overlook. Lilly loves it out here—the sunshine and the sagebrush and the black walnut trees, the odd mule deer nosing quietly along the side of the trail. The year after Joe died, she wore through the soles of two different pairs of shoes.
When she gets back to the house she finds June sitting in the media room with the blinds drawn, watching one of those competitive cooking shows where the contestants have to sabotage each other by hiding each other’s paring knives or replacing all the salt with ricin. She hovers in the doorway for a moment, watching as June glances at her phone, then tosses it onto the couch with a sigh that seems to come from deep inside her chest cavity. A minute later, she picks it up again.
Lilly chews her bottom lip. “He still hasn’t texted?” she asks.
“Don’t you think I would have told you if he’d texted?” June fires back. Then: “Sorry,” she says immediately, even though her tone was completely mild for anyone besides June. She yanks distractedly at the end of her ponytail. “No, he still hasn’t texted. Caroline messaged me this morning, though. It sounds like they’re notgoing to be back in LA for a while. I guess they’re going to spend the holidays with some family in Boston.”
“Boston is terrible,” Lilly declares immediately and with great conviction, though in fact she has never actually been there. Still, the very thought of it conjures a mental tableau of Ben Affleck hoovering Dunkin’ Donuts in a beer-soaked depression while grown men paint their faces in the team colors of the New England Patriots and it’s always twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. “Who purposely spends winter in the Northeast, anyway?” Lilly continues, perching on the arm of the sofa. “It’s like bragging that you’re going to pass a relaxing summer nestled behind Satan’s nutsack.”
“Evocative.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m almost thirty years old,” June moans, flopping backward against the mountain of rooster-print throw pillows their mother had custom-made during her brief but memorable French country period. “I live at home with my parents. I’m a dried-up party girl whose entire claim to fame was being third banana on a now-defunct reality show that once dedicated an entire episode to whether or not my medical aesthetician could successfully shrink a whitehead in time for Demi Lovato’s birthday party. This is humiliating.”
“Oh, that’s not true,” Lilly counters. “You were second banana at least.”
“Mean!” June cries, but she’s laughing, which was the point. “I’m serious. We used to be at least a little bit fabulous, weren’t we? I’m pretty sure we used to be at least a little bit fabulous.”
Lilly considers that. It feels like this lately, if she’s being honest with herself: Like all of them speak a disappearing language, like none of the old rules apply. Like any day now a team ofarchaeologists is going to show up at Pemberly Grove and sink an informational plaque into the ground:ON THIS SITE WAS LOCATED THE HOME OF DOMINIC BENEDETTO AND HIS FIVE DAUGHTERS, BOURGEOIS LAUGHINGSTOCKS, TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY BCE. They’re a civilization in decline, her family. If it isn’t already over, it sure as shit will be soon.
“Well then,” Lilly suggests, because she cannot bear the thought of it for one more moment, “let’s go out and be fabulous.”
She’s expecting June to turn her down but instead her sister looks immediately interested. “Really?” she asks.
Lilly shrugs. “Sure,” she says, though in truth she’s not even sure what that would entail at this point. She stopped going out so much after Joe, the shine worn off the whole scene like costume jewelry passed through too many hands. Still, fundamentally Lilly feels about clubs the way she imagines moms of three from the Upper Midwest feel about Target, which is that as soon as she enters one—no matter which or where or whether she’s been there before—she is instantly, utterly at home. She can think of worse things to do tonight.
She rounds up Kit and Olivia, who are out on the patio pretending to meditate as part of a sponsored campaign they’re doing for a mindfulness app. Tony clicks busily away. “We need to go out and be fabulous,” she reports.
Olivia cracks one eye open. “When are we not?” she retorts, but she dutifully whips her phone out of her shorts pocket and three minutes later has them on the list for a table at a club opening in West Hollywood, a bottle of champagne icing in anticipation of their arrival. “Fabulous enough for you?” she asks pointedly, and Lilly grins.
That night they crowd into June and Lilly’s bathroom to getready, Kit and Mari jostling each other for sink space and the whole house smelling of product and burning hair. Junie sits on the closed toilet lid and tilts her chin up so that Kit can do her eyeliner while Lilly sticks her dress to her boobs with body tape leftover from Olivia’s burlesque-themed eighteenth birthday. When that old Montell Jordan song comes on shuffle Kit turns it up until it’s shaking the floor of the house, all of them singing along like a bunch of goobers at a middle-school dance. What do peopledowho don’t have sisters? Lilly feels heartbroken for them.
At last they’re all dressed and plucked and painted, ambling down the hallway in a cloud of perfume. “Wait!” June calls urgently, stopping so short that they all bang into each other on the landing like something out ofLooney Tunes. “We need a picture.” She holds her phone up, the five of them clustering together as June purses her lips and clicks. “Okay,” she says, once she’s satisfied. “Let’s go.”
Lilly knows what people say about her family—that they’re crass or that they’re grasping, definitive proof that money cannot buy good taste.Those people can go fuck themselves, Lilly thinks happily, then piles into the car behind her gaggle of chattering sisters, all of them zooming off into the balmy desert night.
