Will takes her to lunch, and then to dinner at Dan Tana’s; the following morning they get around to the bagels, slightly stale now but still tasting definitively of the Upper West Side. It occurs to Georgia, as she reaches for the cream cheese, that it’s possible they’ll spend the entirety of her visit this way: leapfrogging from one mostly silent meal to another, their mouths too full to talk.
In the end Will surprises her, though: “When did you see Caroline?” he asks, splashing milk into his iced coffee. His voice is so casual Georgia almost laughs.
“She was in New York a couple of weeks ago,” she explains. “We met for a drink.” She and Caro have always been friendly, though Georgia has never been stupid enough to imagine it has anything to do with her personally. “You know, a few days after you dumped her.”
“I didn’t—” he protests immediately. “I mean, we weren’t—” He stops. “You know about me and Caroline?”
Georgia snorts. “Everybody knows about you and Caroline, dumbass.”
“Even Charlie?”
“Even Charlie.” Georgia munches a sprig of dill from the garden, truly enjoying herself for the first time since she got here. “I gotta tell you, William: you are not, nor have you ever been, quite as low-key as you like to imagine you are.”
Will winces. “Please believe me when I tell you I have never imagined myself to be even remotely low-key.” He stirs the coffee for another moment, though all he’s actually doing at this point is melting the ice. “She was really mad, huh?” he asks quietly. “Caroline, I mean.”
“Caroline doesn’t get mad,” Georgia reminds him. “She gets a media strategy. Let’s just say I probably wouldn’t consider putting myself forward for anyone’s consideration this award season if I were you.”
“Yeah,” Will says. “I guess that tracks.”
“Was that the breakup?” she asks, fanning a couple of slices of tomato across the surface of her bagel. “The one you were talking about yesterday?”
Will drops his head back, sighing. His neck badly needs a shave. “No,” he admits grudgingly, talking up at the citrus trees instead of looking directly at her. “Do you know who Lilly Benedetto is?”
Georgia almost chokes on a caper. “Are you kidding me?” she says, once she’s recovered. “You’re hooking up with Lilly Benedetto?”
“First of all, please don’t say it in that tone of voice,” he begs, closing his eyes forbearingly. “Second of all, no. I hooked up with her, I guess, though I want to go on the record as saying I really hate that language. Past tense.”
“First of all,” Georgia imitates, “you’re a prig and a grandpa. Second of all, no wonder Caroline lost her shit. I’m surprised her brain didn’t come flying out of her head and careen into the ocean like one of those whirligig fireworks.” She twirls a finger to demonstrate. “I do love how you said that, though: ‘Do you know who Lilly Benedetto is?’” She pitches her voice low and dopey. “Like, ‘Have you ever heard of an astronaut called Neil Armstrong?’”
Will scowls. “That’s not what I—”
“‘Are you familiar with an American politician by the name of George Washington?’”
“Okay.”
“‘Have you ever encountered the cuisine of celebrity chef Guy Fieri?’”
“Can you stop?” Will asks, but he’s laughing, the sound of it deep and loose and genuine. He has a nice laugh, Georgia’s brother. She only ever gets it out of him like once a year. “I’m just saying, I didn’t know who she was when we met.”
“I am . . . sure you did not, actually,” Georgia agrees. The thought of it makes her feel very fond of him. “So what happened?”
Will shrugs. “There was a thing,” he says, “with her sister and Nick Harlow.”
“Ah.” Georgia nods, picking at a bit of smoked salmon. “I may have heard something about that.” She doesn’t keep track of Nick, as a general rule, but Olivia Benedetto’s sex tape has been more or less everywhere the last few days, talk of it hanging in the air like a noxious cloud. Georgia would be lying if she said that wasn’t part of the reason she finally just booked a ticket and came out here, a restless energy she couldn’t shake. She was running from something, maybe. But she thinks she was running toward something, too.
“I handled it badly,” Will confesses now. “When the tape came out. I was a donkey about it, I don’t know. And, like, if you pick a fight with one Benedetto—”
“—you better be ready to fight all the Benedettos,” Georgia finishes with a small smile. “I always kind of liked that about them.”
“Yeah,” Will says. “I like it about them, too.”
They’re quiet for a minute, both of them eating their bagels, the birds chittering wildly in the bushes around the pool. “You know, we never really talked about the thing with me and Nick,” Georgia says cautiously. “I kind of feel like there are a lot of things we’ve never really talked about.”
Will bristles, she can see it, the way his back visibly straightens inside his shirt. “Uh-uh,” he protests. “You explicitly told me you didn’t want to talk about Nick. That wasn’t some fucked-up thing where you were, like, dying to confide in me and I—”
“I explicitly told you I didn’t want you to lecture me,” Georgia counters immediately. “There’s a difference.”
“Semantic.”
“Hardly.” She blows a breath out. “You’re my brother, Will,” she tells him, setting her bagel down on her plate, “and I know that your instinct is to stutter and bluster and immediately bail when things get weird or awkward or feelings-y, but I gotta tell you, it’s not exactly a recipe for lasting relationships and robust emotional health. Actually, not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s how you wind up passed out alone on your bathroom floor with an empty bottle of sleeping pills on the counter.”
Will doesn’t answer for a moment, his jaw set and stubborn. He fidgets with the edge of the butter knife beside his plate. “Okay,” he says finally, and it sounds like a challenge. “Well. Let’s talk, then.”
“Okay,” Georgia agrees. “Let’s talk.”
So, they talk: about Nick and about Caroline and about the years they lived with Marcy; about what they’re reading and watching and the woman Georgia’s dating back in New York. She stays for the better part of a week, the two of them strolling the grounds of the Getty and staying up late playing a battered game of Scrabble she picks up at the Rose Bowl flea market. She hasn’t been back to LA since her parents died and being here is sort of wild, like walking around in a dream from when she was a little girl: They drive by the breakfast place their parents used to take them to on Saturday mornings. They drive by their old house in Toluca Lake.
“Do you think he did it on purpose?” Georgia asks.
“Yes,” Will says immediately. They’re idling in the car a little ways down the block, the engine humming. He doesn’t bother to ask what she means. “I think he probably did it on purpose.”
Georgia nods, gazing out the windshield: rusty red roof and bright white stucco, a trio of kids playing freeze tag in the yard. “Yeah,” she says, reaching for Will’s hand across the gearshift and squeezing. Letting go. “I think he probably did, too.”
On her last night in town they pick up dinner from the Meatball King: a pepperoni pizza and an order of garlic knots, Will pulling a couple of beers from the fridge. He looks better since she got here, Georgia notices with some satisfaction. At the very least he’s showered and shaved.
“You think you’ll see her again?” she asks, a cloud of steam rising around her face as she slides a couple of slices onto a plate and hands them over. “Lilly Benedetto, I mean.”
Right away, Will shakes his head. “Nah,” he says, no hesitation. “She doesn’t want to hear from me.”
Georgia bites her lip. He makes her so sad sometimes, her brother, his stubbornness and his solitude and his pride. He breaks her fucking heart. Still, she’s supposed to fly out first thing in the morning, and she doesn’t want to fight with him right before she leaves, after everything that’s happened, so in the end she just shrugs and lifts her slice in a cheesy salute. “Well,” she says, “at the very least you should tell her this pizza is a revelation. Like, say what you will about these people, but they make a delicious fucking pie.”
Will smiles at that, a breeze rustling the leaves of the trees high above them. “Yeah,” he agrees quietly. “You wouldn’t expect it, probably. But the pizza’s the real deal.”