Lilly frowns. “From, like, the bank?”
Kit nods. “I heard them talking about it while you were gone,” she explains. “Something to do with the foreclosure.” Lilly feels the word drop through her body like a marble.
Olivia startles awake. “Are we home?” she asks, pulling off her sunglasses. There’s a crease on her cheek from where the plastic was digging in.
“Yeah, honey,” Lilly says, opening the door and holding a hand out. “We’re home.”
***
June flies in from New York that night. “I shouldn’t have gone,” she says. “I felt like such a sad sack the entire time I was there. And I didn’t see a single play.” She frowns. “How’s Olivia?”
“She’ll be okay,” Lilly promises, trying not to stare. In theweeks they’ve been apart June’s lost what must be close to ten more pounds, her collarbones jutting like fiberglass, her skin gone faintly gray. Lilly opens her mouth, then closes it again, looking around wildly to see if anyone else has noticed, but her mom and sisters are busy nosing through Junie’s luggage, looking for gifts. She imagines being the first person to spy an invading army. She imagines being the first person to smell the smoke at Pompeii.
***
Late that night she finds her mother in the kitchen squinting at her computer, Olivia all over the homepage of the Sinclair; if Cinta thinks it’s strange to be perusing media coverage of her youngest daughter’s sex tape, she gives no indication.
“I’m going to kill him,” Lilly says, reaching out and snapping the laptop closed. She means it, too: she’s going to find Nick and dismember him and leave his body in the desert for the vultures to pick apart like a chicken dinner. Caitriona de Bourgh can find some man to write the screenplay. “I’m going to make him wish he was never born.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic, darling,” her mother says with a wave of her hand. “I think there’s a way we could spin this to our advantage, don’t you? After all, all publicity is—”
“Mom,” Lilly interrupts, holding a hand up. “Please don’t.”
“Well.” Her mother sniffs. “You’re not thinking very creatively, if you ask me.”
They’re quiet for a moment. “Can I ask you something?” Lilly asks, leaning back against the kitchen island. “Why did you decide to marry Dad?”
If her mother thinks it’s strange that Lilly wants to know, she doesn’t show it. “He had the best head of hair I’d ever seen ona man,” she says immediately, no equivocation at all. “Lustrous, spectacular hair.”
Lilly snorts. “Mom,” she says. “Be serious.”
“I am being serious!” her mother protests. “I looked at him and thought, ‘One day I’m going to have sons, and when I do, I want them to have hair like that.’” She shrugs. “Then I had you girls, one after another, and your father went bald, and now here I am.”
“Our hair is very good,” Lilly admits.
“You’re welcome.” Cinta opens the laptop again, and Lilly swallows down a small wave of disappointment at the knowledge that no other answer will be forthcoming. The worst part is that she doesn’t even think her mother is being facetious: when Lilly thinks about what her parents could possibly have seen in each other thirty years ago, thick, gleaming hair seems about as good a reason as any. How are you supposed to know who someone is going to be in three decades? How can you even know who they are right now?
Lilly takes a deep breath. “Listen,” she says, “about the appraiser.”
“Oh, Lilly,” her mother says, not looking up from the screen. “Drop the rock, will you?”
“Drop the—?” Lilly frowns. “I mean, sure, but also the rock is our house, Mom. The rock is the place where we live. So if we’re going to lose it, then I want to at least—”
“Contrary to what your father might have you believe, Elisabetta,” Cinta interrupts her, “you are not actually the woman in charge in this house.”
Lilly blinks, feeling briefly like her mother has slapped her. She leans back against the lounge chair, swallowing down a burning sensation that is, she tells herself firmly, definitely not tears. It’s just that she’s tired, maybe. It’s been a crazy couple of days. “Okay,” she says quietly. “Well. Sorry.”
“That’s fine,” her mother replies. “I’m glad you could go get your sister.”
“Yeah,” Lilly replies, once she’s sure her voice is steady. “I’m glad I could go get her, too.”
Chapter Thirty
Cinta
They’re going to lose the house, obviously.
Oh, Cinta knows it; of course Cinta knows it. She’s known it for years, somewhere in the back of her brain’s bargain basement: that the money wasn’t coming in like it used to, that there was no way it could possibly last. She grew up eating margarine sandwiches, her pants always two inches short at the ankles. She can smell lack a mile away.
