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 not going 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 of archaeologists 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 get ready, 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 people do who 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 of Looney 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.
* * *
The club is hot and loud and crowded, the wallpaper vaguely baroque; they get their drinks and settle in, Junie drifting off to say hello to some girls she knows who sell expensive condos on the Hollywood Channel while Kit and Olivia pose for selfies in front of a neon sign that says FOR SHAME. “This is good,” Lilly announces, downing her champagne perhaps more quickly than necessary. Isobel is here, perched on a balcony up in the VIP area, her shoulders bare and sharp-looking. “I’m glad we did this.” Mari nibbles her hair in reply.
Lilly waves to Isobel, who smiles tightly before turning her attention elsewhere. She pulls out her phone and pretends to send a text. The truth is now that they’re here the whole errand feels deeply and abruptly ridiculous: the dresses and the crowd and the angling to be photographed, the bottle service they certainly cannot afford. Probably she should have suggested a movie night instead.
Finally she peels off to go to the bathroom, slipping neatly past two girls doing lines off the backs of their manicured hands and shutting herself safely inside a stall. She’s just about to flush when she hears the door swing open, a cloud of Dior wafting in. “—the most pathetic,” a woman’s voice is saying. “Did you see that, like, all five Benedetto sisters are floating around out there?”
“Oh my god, yes,” a second voice agrees, this one vaguely familiar. “In Forever 21’s most glamorous evening wear.”
The first one snorts. “There goes the neighborhood, et cetera.”
“It’s fine,” a third voice says—Isobel’s, Lilly realizes suddenly, high and musical and the slightest bit French for no discernable reason. “I mean, you know it’s only a matter of time before one of them does something to get kicked out and banned for life. Just make sure you don’t wind up in any photos together for them to splash on every conceivable social media site as supposed proof of how people still tolerate them and you’ll be good.”
Lilly frowns, sitting down fully dressed on the toilet and trying to ignore the familiar drop in her chest. It’s not so much that her feelings are hurt. Sure, they are, a little, but she’s heard plenty of way meaner stuff before, both in the bathroom at Saint Ann’s before homeroom and in the opening monologue of the Golden Globe Awards. It’s not a big deal. It’s just that it gets tiring sometimes, being a national punch line. It’s just that there was a time when she thought Isobel was her friend.
For a moment she thinks about bursting out of the stall like the Kool-Aid Man and embarrassing them, granting herself the small pleasure of watching their contoured faces go white, but in the end it feels like a lot of work for nothing. It’s her own fault, probably: it was silly of her to come out to begin with, to think this would solve June’s broken heart or her own restless boredom, the feeling that she forgot to do something important and now it’s too late.
All at once Lilly is exhausted—the noise and the warm crush of bodies, the thump of the bass in her spine. She thinks she might beg off, get an Uber and spend the rest of the night at home, but when she goes to let her sisters know she’s leaving, she can’t find them. They’re not at the bar or camped on the low cluster of couches or behind the rope in the cordoned-off VIP area—which, not for nothing, she doesn’t think they’d actually be allowed into anymore. They’re not fighting a minor pop star and her entourage in the alley outside the club.
Where are you??? she texts the group chat, a strange flush of panic buzzing through her. For one truly unhinged moment, she feels like she might be about to cry. Did you leave???
Finally she spots them in the center of the dance floor: all four of them clustered together, luminous in the strobing lights. They look like a frolic of fairies, a tangle of sequins and limbs.
“There she is!” June hollers as Lilly approaches, unsteady with relief at the sight of them. “Come dance!”
Lilly shakes her head, jerking a thumb toward the exit. “I think I’m actually going to—”
“No way!” Kit interrupts, grabbing Lilly by both hands and pulling her into the circle. “Stay with us.”
So: Lilly stays.
They dance for a long time, sweaty and breathless: their arms wrapped around each other, their hair in each other’s mouths. For a while Lilly forgets how little she has to show for herself, after everything. For a while she just feels . . . glad.
“Hey,” someone says, pointing his finger in their direction; when she turns to look it’s an actor she recognizes vaguely from a handful of Christmas movies on Netflix, handsome and affable and drunk. “Aren’t you—?”
“Sisters?” Lilly supplies, gathering them tight around her as she bares her teeth in a smile. “How’d you guess?”
* * *
Their uncle Lou and aunt Veronica come from New York for Christmas, descending on Pemberly Grove with a panettone fresh out of a Bay Ridge bakery and a dozen brown paper shopping bags from Bloomingdale’s. Lou and Dominic grew up together back in Newark; Lou was a silent partner in the Meatball King back in the early aughts, but instead of spending the returns maintaining the lifestyle to which his daughters had quickly become accustomed, Lou quietly invested his portion in some tech startups out of Silicon Valley, and now neither he nor Veronica have to work ever again. Instead the two of them spend most of the year traveling in Europe and South America, splitting their time at home between a Craftsman in Carmel and a tony apartment in Brooklyn Heights.
It’s a cozy, boozy holiday, Veronica dragging them all to the seafood market so she can make the Seven Fishes and everyone staying up late to watch The Godfather, a Benedetto family tradition. They get dressed up and go to the Festival of Carols, drink champagne from juice glasses around the pool on Christmas morning. Olivia posts a photo of herself in a red and white bikini and a Santa hat on Instagram, and it gets four hundred thousand likes. It’s the first Christmas Lilly’s felt like herself in a long time, and if there’s a tiny part of her that can’t help but wonder if it’s the last one they’ll spend in this house, well, she does her damnedest to put the idea out of her mind.
She pulls June into the pantry beside a couple of forgotten meal kits, which have begun to emit an odor all of them have tacitly decided to ignore: “How you doing?” she asks, plucking a bag of red and green M&M’s off the shelf and holding it out in June’s direction. June’s been shining it on, bingeing Hallmark movies and making pizzelles with the rest of them, though Lilly can’t help but notice that she hasn’t actually eaten any of them.
Now she waves off both the candy and the question. “I’m fine,” June insists, and her smile is almost convincing. “I promise. Honestly, we were barely even dating. If I were Taylor Swift I probably wouldn’t even bother writing a song.”
“Okay.” Lilly takes a breath, and then she says it. “Junie,” she begins quietly, “you’re getting a tiny bit thin.”
Right away June’s shoulders straighten, her eyes flashing wary and hot. “I said I was fine, Lilly.”
“June—”
“I’m the big sister, all right?” she asks, brushing past Lilly and out into the kitchen. “I know neither one of us acts like it, but it’s true.”
Lilly isn’t buying it, and apparently neither is Veronica: “Why don’t you come back East with us after New Year’s, Junebug?” she suggests later that evening. They’re drinking Manhattans around the fireplace, which keeps flickering out intermittently and filling the room with the unmistakable smell of a gas leak. “Do some shopping, see some theater.”
“Eat at a restaurant that doesn’t have microgreens on the menu,” Lou puts in, patting his gut.
“It’s not like we don’t have the room,” Veronica continues, raising her voice so that June can hear her over the sound of Cinta and Colin warbling an extended version of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” at the top of their voices. “Louie’s going to be traveling. You’d be doing me a favor. I get weird when I’m alone too long. I start talking to the cats.”
“You talk to the cats regardless,” Lou says mildly.
Lilly smiles. Veronica and Lou have always been a stark contrast to her own parents: how much they seem to like each other, the two of them always holding hands and teasing each other with little inside jokes. Lilly remembers staying at their apartment in New York back when she was fourteen or fifteen and realizing one of them had written a dirty little note to the other in the magnetic poetry kit on the stainless-steel fridge.
“Anyway,” Veronica says now, “you should think about it. You too, Lilly.”
Lilly shakes her head. “That sounds amazing, but I should stay here and get some work done,” she says, which is true, though it’s not the only reason: She likes to have everyone in one place, where she can see them. She likes to be able to make sure everyone is whole.
“I’ll go!” Olivia pipes up from the other end of the couch, still in her red and white bikini. Veronica, reaching for her wineglass, politely pretends she didn’t hear.
* * *
Lilly gets up early the day after Christmas and drives to Charlotte’s house in Silver Lake, a cheery yellow bungalow with a riot of lavender and rosemary growing in a wild tangle outside the front door. “I fucked up,” she announces when Charlotte answers.
“You did,” Charlotte agrees, stepping back to let her in.
They look at each other for a moment, wary. Charlotte is wearing a Johnson & Wales tank top and a pair of reindeer antlers, her bright red hair a thick rope of braid slung over one freckled shoulder. “Come on,” she says at last, antlers bouncing as she nods toward the kitchen. “There’s coffee.”
Lilly follows her down the hallway. She loves Charlotte’s place: the airiness of it, the arched doors and clay tile and hundreds of cookbooks lining the shelves in the living room. A bright pair of screen prints hangs above the sofa; a quilt Charlotte’s mother made at a women’s retreat in Taos slouches over the back of the chair. Lilly thinks she’d like to have something similar, if she ever manages to get it together enough to move out of her childhood bedroom again—not the specific décor of this place so much as the feel of it, like an actual adult woman lives here complete with her own set of wineglasses and several potted plants.
“I’m sorry,” she says, once Charlotte has handed her a mug—smooth, heavy pottery, hand-thrown by a ceramicist Charlotte knows through work. “You’re my best friend, and I love you, and you deserved better than my shitty behavior. No matter what baggage I have around Colin, there was no reason for me to be . . .” She trails off, waving her hand vaguely, but Charlotte only tilts her head to the side.
“Go on.”
Lilly sighs loudly. “A cranky old bitch, okay? Is that what you want to hear?”
“Yes,” Charlotte says immediately. “That’s actually exactly what I want to hear.”
“Fine,” Lilly replies. “In that case, I’m very sorry I was a cranky old bitch to your boyfriend and also, you know.” She winces. “Accused him of sexual assault.”
Charlotte presses her lips together, like possibly she’s trying to hide a smile. “You did do that, didn’t you.”
“I did,” Lilly says grimly.
“Yeah.” Charlotte sits down on a stool at the kitchen island, wrapping both hands around her mug. “He’s going to Joshua Tree after New Year’s, and he asked me to go with him,” she confesses, her voice quiet and almost shy. Then, without waiting for Lilly to comment: “I told him I’d love to.”
Lilly blinks. “Wow,” she says, struggling to absorb that information without making a retching sound like the bratty little brother in a 1980s family comedy. “What about the restaurant?”
“We usually close for a couple of weeks in January anyway, remember? It’ll be fine without me for a little bit.” Charlotte shrugs. “You should come out and see us for a few days,” she suggests. “The place Caitriona’s assistant found for him has a little guest cottage out back by the pool, so you’d have plenty of privacy.” Her lips twitch, mischievous.
Lilly snorts. “Noted.” The idea of purposely subjecting herself to a desert vacation with Colin is only slightly less appealing than that of curling up in a sand pit and waiting for a lonely rattlesnake to find her and make her his bride; still, the naked hope on Charlotte’s face makes her feel like the worst person in the universe. They’ve been friends for a long time. “Maybe,” Lilly hedges.
“No maybe,” Charlotte counters. “If anybody could stand to blow this town for a little while, you could. Besides, Colin’s teaching a writing seminar while he’s out there that I really think you’d get a lot out of.” Then, when Lilly only stares at her: “I’m kidding! Oh my god, Lilly.” She sets her coffee down and takes Lilly’s face in two hands, planting a smacking kiss on her cheek. “I’m kidding. I forgive you. And I’m happy, okay? Try to be happy for me, if you can.”
Lilly nods. “I’m sorry,” she says again—putting her hands over Charlotte’s, feeling herself flush. “I am. I’d love to come out.”
“Thank you,” Charlotte says, letting go. “In the meantime, I’m going to get dressed and you can come to the Grove with me. My mom did all her Christmas shopping with Rebecca Barnes this year and I have like four different ruffly Victorian nightgowns I have to return.”
Lilly grins. “I’d love to,” she repeats, more truthfully this time, and finishes the rest of her coffee.