Lilly nudges her mother gently out of the way, opening up the tubs and boxes. June rummages through the untidy cupboards, setting out plates and napkins as their father strides in from the pool house, where, following a massive heart attack a couple of years ago, he now spends the better part of his days listening to the This Is: Billy Joel playlist on Spotify and pedaling his recumbent bicycle. Whenever he comes upon all five of his daughters in the wild there’s always a moment when his expression is the slightest bit befuddled, like they sautéed his vegetables in butter instead of olive oil at Spago and he’s trying to recalculate the macros in his head.
Now he looks from the take-out cartons to Lilly’s mother, then back again, frown lines furrowing his crispy forehead. “I thought you were going to cook.”
Cinta shrugs. “I thought I was going to marry Mark Harmon,” she tells him, thrusting a container of noodles into his hands and shooing him away from the island. “Looks like we were both wrong.”
Her father catches Lilly’s eye across the kitchen, raising his voluminous brows in exaggerated forbearance. Lilly winks at him in reply before grabbing a can of seltzer out of the fridge and following June into the dining room. They literally never ate together before the show started filming, when the network mandated a once-weekly family dinner in an attempt to maximize every available opportunity to get all seven of them in the shot—and, presumably, for somebody to say or do something inflammatory or offensive, though that was never explicitly mentioned in the production notes. In the end, the ritual outlasted the three seasons thatMeet the Benedettosran on cable, and they still wind up gathered around the table almost every Friday night.
“I’m serious, Cinta,” their father says now, the light from the reproduction art deco chandelier bouncing off his head at the far end of the table. A few months ago he fired their housekeeper as a cost-cutting measure and signed them up for a meal delivery service instead, only he didn’t realize it was the kind where you had to cook the food yourself, and since then the insulated cardboard boxes have begun to pile up in the pantry like a cursed tower of Pisa while their mother happily patronizes every take-out establishment in Los Angeles County, and a couple in San Bernardino besides. “We can’t just be ordering dinner for seven people every night of the goddamn we—”
“It’s rice, Dominic.” Their mother waves him off. “I know that to hear you talk about it we’re one order of General Tso’s away from a life of penury on Skid Row, but I certainly think we can afford ri—”
“It’s not just the rice,” Dominic interrupts. “You know that. It’s the rice, the house, the clothes—”
“On top of which, if you want someone to cook those damn meal kits so badly—”
“—not to mention the spa trips to Malibu—”
“—I seem to recall that there’s someone in this family who loves to talk about how he went to culinary school—”
“—and the collagen injections—”
“—though I don’t know that the certificate program at DeVry University is precisely what Escoffier had in mind—”
“Hey!” Lilly interrupts brightly, plucking a dumpling from its white paper carton as June casts her a grateful look across the table. “Here’s a hard conversational swerve. Did you guys see somebody moved in next door to the Lucases?”
“About time,” their mother sniffs. There are probably a dozen vacant properties in Pemberly Grove these days. The one on Netherfield Place has been empty for over a year, before which it was occupied by a couple of thirtysomething guys with slick haircuts who Cinta was convinced were using it as a set for adult films. “How do you know what the sets for adult films look like, exactly?” Olivia asked her once; Cinta’s eyes narrowed before she huffed off to the aesthetician without condescending to reply.
“Not just somebody,” Kit says now, reaching for the kung pao with the self-satisfied smile of a person who knows something. “It’s Charlie Bingley.”
Right away, everyone except their father whirls to look at her. “Charlie Bingley?” Olivia’s eyes are wide.
“Like,Charlie BingleyCharlie Bingley?” Lilly is intrigued in spite of herself. In the last couple of years Charlie Bingley has transitioned seemingly effortlessly from second banana in a series of teenage gross-out flicks to a bona fide A-lister, the muscly star of a forthcoming comic book trilogy calledMajor Fantasticthat promises to be both extremely loud and incredibly lucrative.Peoplemagazine recently declared him the nicest guy in Hollywood—a former high school football star turned Juilliard grad whose devotion to his mom back in Chicago is eclipsed only by how much he loves his rescue dog. Lilly has lived in LA long enough to know it’s probably only a matter of time until he’s unmasked as a pervert or a cannibal or, worst of all, a Scientologist. Still, it’s not like she’d turn her nose up at the opportunity to get a gander athim washing his car in the driveway. “What the fuck is he doing here?”
“Excuse me,” their mother counters immediately, the threat implicit in her voice. “This is a very exclusive neighborhood.”
“Is it, though?” Kit tilts her head to the side.
“You’re welcome to move out anytime, Katrina,” their father reminds her, barely glancing up from the mountain of steamed vegetables heaped onto his plate. “Encouraged, even.”
“There’s another guy living there, too,” Mari informs them, reaching for the carton of chicken and broccoli. “I saw him the other night.”
“Through your telescope?” Kit asks immediately.
“What do you mean, another guy?” Their mother’s eyes narrow. “A boyfriend?”
“If Charlie Bingley is gay I will literally fling myself into the ocean,” Olivia announces.
“You should ring his doorbell and tell him that,” Lilly advises, helping herself to another dumpling. “I’m sure he’d be happy to stop dating men for you.”
“You should ring his doorbell regardless!” Cinta exclaims. “Honestly, I can’t believe none of you have invited him over already. He’s going to think we’re all a bunch of low-rent inconsequentials with no manners.”
“Oh,” Marianne replies, “I’m sure we can all agree he probably thinks that already.”
Their mother shoots her a murderous look, and Lilly ducks her head to hide a grin. After all, it’s not like Mari is wrong: their family is steeped in the kind of cultural notoriety normally reserved for disgraced politicians or the emcees of beloved children’s shows who later get caught masturbating in movie theaters. Lilly’sfather made a not-insignificant fortune a decade ago, rising to a campy sort of local celebrity with commercials for his small chain of red-sauce Italian restaurants, the Meatball King. They still run, occasionally—every once in a while Lilly will be flipping channels late at night and catch sight of her dad mugging like Luigi fromMario Kartin front of an enormous brick oven, crowing the King’s iconic slogan: “You won’t believe the balls on us!”
The business grew; they moved from a modest house in the Valley to Pemberly Grove when Lilly was sixteen. Cinta enrolled them all in a tony private school, where Lilly took AP Literature and Composition and also wrote the occasional paper for Isobel DesRoche, the famous hotelier’s fashion model daughter. Isobel took her out to the clubs on Hollywood and Sunset; Lilly brought June, who caught the attention of the second-most-handsome member of a screamingly popular boy band, and suddenly there they were in their party dresses on the blogs and in the magazines, photographers snapping pictures while they drank their iced lattes at Starbucks and a camera crew running cables through their living room for the first season ofMeet the Benedettos. Cinta hired a ghostwriter to pen a glossy paperback about parenting socialite daughters. Kit and Olivia launched a juniors’ line at Kohl’s. Their father licensed the Meatball King as a franchise, and if, all these years later, neither the restaurants nor their family’s alleged celebrity—not to mention Lilly’s friendship with Isobel—are exactly what one might call thriving, their mother still carries herself like a deposed queen stubbornly awaiting her golden jubilee.
Now Cinta sighs and reaches for her wineglass, visibly bored with all of them. “You’re not the only one with exciting news,” she tells Lilly. “Guess who I had lunch with today?”
