Carol accepted everything with grace. Rob accepted everything with silence. Lily accepted everything with a cheerfulness that baffled the givers because it was absolutely, maddeningly genuine.
"Thank you so much, Aunt Karen! I've been wanting this sweater!" Even when the sweater had a bleach stain on the sleeve and smelled faintly of Jessica's perfume.
Lily Bennett was five feet tall, weighed a hundred and five pounds soaking wet, had a face that was more cute than pretty and a brain that was more enthusiastic than brilliant. She was studying public health at Northampton Community College because it was what she could afford, not because it was what she loved. What she loved was art - paintings, sculptures, the way light fell through stained glass in old churches. She loved the world, all of it, every square inch she hadn't seen yet.
At ten, she'd stuck a pin in a world map for every city she intended to visit. By twelve, the map was more pin than paper. At fifteen, she'd declared to anyone who would listen that she would travel the globe after graduation. At twenty, she still meant it, even though the globe seemed significantly larger when viewed from the vantage point of a community college student with $847 in her savings account.
But she was here. Philadelphia. One pin down. Only about three hundred to go.
"This is going to be the best weekend of our lives," she told Tommy as she dropped her duffel on the floor.
Tommy looked at the stain on the ceiling that might have been water damage or might have been a Rorschach test. "Sure," he said.
The trouble started, as trouble often does, with a disagreement about how to spend time.
Sixteen people. Sixteen opinions. One city. Three days.
They gathered at Rittenhouse Square the next morning - a park so beautiful that even Jessica stopped complaining for thirty seconds to admire the elms - and immediately began arguing.
"I want to go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art," Lily said, pulling up a list on her phone that was longer than most people's grocery receipts. "And the Barnes Foundation. And Independence Hall. And Longwood Gardens - that's outside the city but it's supposed to be incredible. And then-"
"Nobody wants to look at old stuff," Jake said.
"I do."
"Yeah, well, you're weird."
"The Franklin Institute has a giant heart you can walk through," Tommy offered. "That's cool."
"Museums are a waste of time," Frank Price declared, checking his own phone. "We should hit the King of Prussia Mall. It's the biggest on the East Coast."
"I want to go to the beach," Jessica said. "Is there a beach?"
"The Jersey Shore is an hour away," Kyle informed her.
"I said beach, not boardwalk."
Greg Davis, who had the calm authority of a man who'd spent twenty years in accounting, spread his hands. "Why don't we just go to Washington? It's only two hours. The Smithsonian is free."
"Washington is boring," Jessica said.
"You've never been to Washington."
"I can tell."
Karen sided with her daughter, as Karen always did with Jessica. "If we're driving two hours, we might as well go to Atlantic City."
"Atlantic City is three hours," Rob said mildly.
"Even better. More time in the car, more nap time." Karen smiled like this was wisdom.
Diane Sullivan-Bennett, who had been quietly moisturizing her hands with travel lotion throughout this entire exchange, looked up and said, "Maybe we should split up."
The silence that followed suggested this was either the best or worst idea anyone had ever had, depending on who was listening.
Carol glanced at Rob, who gave the tiniest shrug - the Bennett family equivalent of a twenty-minute strategy meeting. They'd been married long enough to communicate in gestures, in the particular way Rob rubbed the back of his neck when he agreed but didn't want to say so.
"That's actually sensible," Carol said. "We don't all have to do the same thing. Rob and I will take Lily and Tommy to the museums. The rest of you can do whatever you'd like. We'll meet back at the hotel for dinner."
"Dinner?" Frank scoffed. "I'm not eating at that hotel."
"Nobody said the hotel. We'll find somewhere."
"I know a place," Lily piped up. "Pat's King of Steaks. It's where they invented the Philly cheesesteak. It's been there since 1930."
"It's probably filthy," Jessica said.
"It's legendary."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
Lily grinned. This was the thing about Lily that most people didn't understand - the thing that made her relatives shake their heads and her classmates raise their eyebrows and her mother smile in that particular way that meant she saw exactly who her daughter was and loved every inch of it. Lily Bennett was not naive. She knew her family was poor. She knew her face was ordinary. She knew her grades were average and her prospects were modest and her five-foot frame would never turn heads in a room.
She just didn't care.
Not in the way of someone who was pretending not to care, or someone who'd given up, but in the genuinely unbothered way of a person who had looked at the hand life dealt her and decided it was a perfectly good hand, thank you very much, and she was going to play it with enthusiasm.
This was infuriating to people like Jessica, who believed that happiness should be proportional to one's Instagram following and closet size. And it was puzzling to people like Linda, who couldn't fathom being content with a mortgage you could barely pay. But it was the truth of Lily Bennett, as fundamental as her brown eyes and her chronic inability to reach the top shelf of anything.