The thing about Philadelphia was that it could kill you with beauty one moment and just plain kill you the next.
Lily Bennett didn't know that yet. She was too busy pressing her forehead against the minivan window, watching the skyline materialize through the summer haze like a promise she'd waited her whole life to collect. The Liberty Bell. Independence Hall. The Rocky steps. Everything she'd dreamed about since she was ten years old and stuck a pin in Philadelphia on the classroom map, right next to the hundred other pins marking every city she intended to see before she died.
"Lily, your breath is fogging up my window," her brother Tommy said from the seat beside her.
"It's not your window."
"It's on my side."
"The van belongs to Uncle Dan. None of the windows are yours."
Tommy, fifteen and convinced he'd cornered the market on teenage wisdom, rolled his eyes so hard Lily was surprised they didn't get stuck. "You're twenty years old and you're acting like we just landed on the moon."
"Better than acting like nothing impresses you when you've never been farther than Atlantic City."
"I've been to New York."
"A school field trip to the Statue of Liberty doesn't count."
Their mother, Carol Bennett, turned from the passenger seat with the serene smile of a woman who'd spent two decades refining the art of selective deafness. "Both of you, please. We're almost there."
Their father Rob kept his eyes on the road, navigating the rented minivan through traffic with the careful precision of a man who drove a forklift for a living and treated every vehicle like it might tip over if he breathed wrong. Rob Bennett was not an adventurous man. He was a factory supervisor at Lehigh Steel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania - had been for twenty-two years - and the most exciting thing that had ever happened to him was winning the company holiday raffle three months ago.
Two nights at a Philadelphia hotel. Breakfast included. Parking not included - nothing in Philadelphia was free, Rob had learned - but the gesture was enough to set off an avalanche.
Because Lily Bennett did not do anything small.
"If we're going to Philly," she'd announced at the kitchen table the moment Rob brought home the prize envelope, "then we should go properly. Not just us. Everyone."
"Everyone" turned out to be sixteen people.
Carol's older sister Linda and her husband Greg Davis. Carol's younger sister Karen and her husband Frank Price. Rob's cousin Dan Bennett and his wife Diane. And all their collective offspring: Kyle Davis, who was twenty-two and fresh out of the Army; Brittany and Jessica Price, twenty and seventeen respectively; Rachel and Emily Bennett, nineteen and eighteen; and Jake Bennett, who was seventeen and thought he was invincible.
It had taken three weeks of planning, two more rented vehicles, and a spreadsheet that Carol maintained with the ruthless efficiency of a military logistics officer. They'd crammed a long weekend's worth of ambitions into a Tuesday-to-Sunday itinerary, driven down from Bethlehem in a convoy that would have looked appropriate for a presidential motorcade if presidential motorcades consisted of dented minivans and a Hyundai Sonata with a busted taillight.
And now here they were. Philadelphia. The City of Brotherly Love.
God, Lily loved it already.
The Hotel Mariana on 20th Street smelled like industrial carpet cleaner and broken dreams, but it had functioning air conditioning and a lobby vending machine that sold Tastykakes, which in Lily's opinion made it practically the Ritz.
"This is it?" Jessica Price stood in the middle of the room she was sharing with her sister Brittany, her lip curled in the specific expression of a seventeen-year-old who had expected marble countertops and received laminate.
"It's got beds and hot water," Lily said cheerfully, passing by their open door with her duffel bag over her shoulder. "What else do you need?"
"A view that isn't a parking lot?"
"The parking lot is free. That's basically a Philadelphia miracle."
Jessica made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a death rattle of her expectations. Lily didn't wait to find out. She was already halfway to her own room, which she was sharing with Tommy because the Bennett family operated on a budget tighter than the lid on Carol's mason jars.
That was the thing about the Bennetts - the real Bennetts, Rob and Carol's branch of the family tree. They didn't have money. They had never had money. They would likely never have money. Rob's salary covered the mortgage, the bills, and enough left over for Carol to perform weekly miracles at the grocery store, stretching ground beef and canned tomatoes into meals that tasted like love even when they tasted like nothing else.
And they were happy. Genuinely, irritatingly, bewilderingly happy.
This drove the rest of the family insane.
Linda and Greg had a four-bedroom colonial in Allentown and two cars that were less than five years old. Karen and Frank owned a small chain of dry cleaners that did well enough for annual vacations and a daughter - Jessica - who never wore the same outfit to school twice. Dan and Diane had the biggest house of all, a sprawling thing in Easton with a swimming pool that Dan mentioned at every family gathering the way some men mentioned their military service.
They looked at Rob and Carol with the particular breed of pity that the comfortable reserve for the content. Every Christmas brought hand-me-down clothes in garbage bags, "gently used" kitchen appliances, books with broken spines. The gifts were always delivered with smiles that said: we're so generous and wasn't it nice of us to think of you.
