“I don’t know what your problem is,” Cinta puts in, poking one of the cleaners in the back with one finger and motioning to a smudge on the mirror. “Colin’s a very successful screenwriter. I would think you of all people would be grateful for the chance to talk to him about your craft.”
Lilly sighs. Sometimes she has a hard time reconciling this mother with the same one who used to get down on the floor withthem to play Barbies when they were little, who held their hair back over the second-floor toilet in the little house in the Valley when they got sick. “Tell us your best story, Lilly-girl,” she used to say, Lilly nestled into the crook of her arm at bedtime. “I’m listening.”
Colin shows up in the late afternoon driving a Porsche and wearing a pair of aviators that make him look like a badly behaved detective on a spin-off of a spin-off of a police procedural that takes place in metro Houston. “Lil,” he says, as if they’re friends, which they aren’t, and as if that’s a thing her friends call her, which it is not. When he bends to kiss her on both cheeks he smells like a national park by way of Abercrombie & Fitch.
“Colin!” Kit and Olivia come thundering down the stairs, flinging themselves at him with the enthusiasm of puppies. Right away, Colin’s ears turn pink. When they were kids he was always terminally awkward, dressed in cargo shorts and Star Wars T-shirts and deeply afraid of girls in general and her sisters in particular. From the look on his face Lilly is pretty sure he’s still afraid of them.
“Since when are you guys pals?” Lilly mutters, grabbing Kit’s elbow as they troop out to the yard.
“Since he got invited to Cannes,” Kit says plainly.
They have dinner out on the patio, Colin tucking into the macrobiotic feast Cinta ordered him specially from a pop-up called the Grainforest and holding forth about his various successes, how he’s working with Caitriona de Bourgh on his next film. “You all know Caitriona, right?” he asks.
“I think I might have heard of her,” June says innocently. Lilly stifles a laugh. Caitriona de Bourgh is arguably the second-most-famous director in Hollywood, one of those women who isperpetually wearing a leather jacket and making movies full of unspeakable carnage just to prove that she can. She’s famous for zipping around LA on a motorcycle, spewing a cloud of exhaust in her wake.
Colin turns to Lilly. “What about you,cugina?” he asks her. Colin isn’t related on the Italian side of their family, not that it ever stops him. “How’s the writing these days?”
“Oh, you know,” Lilly says, biting back a grimace, swallowing down a weird rush of shame. “It’s going.”
Colin nods indulgently. “Let me know if you ever want me to take a look at some pages,” he offers. “I’d be happy to let you pick my brain.”
“That’s tempting,” she says, as politely as she can manage. “It’s not really ready for that.”
Cinta clucks. “Don’t listen to her, Colin,” she chides. “My daughter has been pecking away at that computer night and day for ages. I keep telling her that if she’s not going to let anyone see what she’s working on she should at least look into a brand partnership.”
By the time Lilly wakes up the next morning and makes it downstairs Colin has already set up shop at the patio table, a vintage typewriter in front of him and no fewer than four different beverages at his side. He’s halfway through what, from the sound of it, is an incredibly detailed, granular story about the time Ben Affleck asked him for a stick of gum outside a Sally Beauty in Santa Monica.
“Lilly!” her father exclaims. He’s sitting across the table in his bathrobe, his voice sharp with the bright desperation of a sailor held captive by particularly garrulous pirates. “You’re here!”
Lilly hides a smile, but barely. “I’m here,” she agrees.
“Colin here is an early riser,” Dominic reports. “He caughtme on my way to my workout and we have just been... talking ever since.”
“That sounds lovely,” Lilly says. “I’m sorry I can’t stay and join you, but I’ve got—” What? A lobotomy? A Pap smear? “—another engagement.”
Her father jumps up and takes her arm as she makes her escape back into the kitchen, lowering his voice to a mutter. “I am begging you, Elisabetta. Get this person out of my house. Take him to a horse race. Go shopping on Rodeo Drive. Bind his hands and feet, roll him up in a carpet, and leave him in an alley, it’s entirely up to you. But he’s gotta go.”
In the end she rounds up her sisters—well, all of her sisters except Mari, who claimed to be attending an exorcism in Mulholland Heights—and Charlotte and they go to brunch at a vegan place near the development, splitting a bucket of champagne on the patio while Colin delivers a lengthy monologue about the death of the author and what he keeps describing, in earnest, as theAnnie HallProblem. Lilly is considering ordering a vodka tonic or possibly a gun when a couple of guys in extremely tight pants stop by the table.
“Olivia Benedetto,” the taller one says. Lilly vaguely recognizes him as one of her sister’s exes, all prominent cheekbones and a vaguely goth sensibility. Olivia’s boyfriends always look like supporting werewolves on a CW show about a haunted town in the Midwest; usually they’re deejays or club promoters or British pop stars with one hit that borrows heavily from the work of Black artists. “How you doing?”
“Oh, you know,” Olivia says coyly, tonguing the straw in her green juice. “No complaints.” She gestures around the table. “You remember my sisters.”
“Of course,” Tyler says with a smile. “How could anyone forget?” He nods at the guy next to him, who’s nice-looking in a slightly scruffy kind of way, a chambray shirt rolled to the elbows and a tangle of bracelets looped around one elegant wrist. “This is my buddy Nick.”
In the end they push the tables together, ordering another round of drinks while Colin lectures Charlotte on the benefits of intermittent fasting and Lilly eyes Nick across the table. “Are you a promoter, too?” she asks.
“Tyler is an entrepreneur,” Olivia corrects huffily. “He just launched a bespoke women’s lingerie disruptor.”
“That sounds fascinating,” Lilly lies.
Nick is a bartender downtown, though when Lilly asks him where he works he shakes his head bashfully. “You’re definitely not going to have heard of it,” he tells her, and sure enough she hasn’t. Still, he says, “You guys should come by.”
Tyler laughs out loud, not entirely nicely. “The Benedetto girls don’t go to dive bars,” he says.
“Fuck you!” Lilly says, though it’s not like he’s wrong. They went to one once on the show, but it was actually a new bar made to look old, with kitschy lamps repurposed from a Pizza Hut hung over all the tables and a palpable sense of smug superiority. The plot of the episode was Kit trying to convince the bartender to make her an Aperol spritz.
“Dude, I love a dive bar,” Colin puts in. “So real, you know? Like, authentic.”
