She’d made it through Pillow Talk and was on to All That Heaven Allows when the doorbell rang. Teddy frowned as her knitting needles stilled. Perhaps it was a delivery person. But then the doorbell rang again, and again, and someone started knocking.
“Okay, all right, I get the point!” she said, standing up and crossing the room. She yanked open the front door and came face-to-face with her sister.
“Sophia?” she asked.
Sophia’s eyes widened. “Whoa.”
Teddy self-consciously touched her hair, which she realized had come halfway out of her bun. It was hard to make a bun with a bob—it required a lot of bobby pins. “I don’t look that bad.”
Sophia squinted at her. “Why are you wearing my junior high softball T-shirt? How did you even get that?”
Teddy crossed her arms over her chest. “Anything you didn’t take with you when you went to college was fair game. I’ve had it for years and it’s mine now. Don’t judge my wardrobe. And anyway, shouldn’t you be at work?”
Sophia shook her head. “I took some time off. Do you want to take a walk?”
Teddy looked behind her at the television, where Rock Hudson was wearing flannel. Then she looked down at her T-shirt and sweatpants and sighed. “Let me put the ice cream back in the freezer.”
* * *
—
TEDDY DID FEEL better once she combed her hair, threw a coat on over her ensemble, and got out in the fresh air. It was cold, but the sunshine made her feel at least somewhat human. But as she and Sophia walked down the sidewalk, she grew more and more confused.
“What’s going on?” Teddy finally asked. “I can count on no fingers the number of times you’ve come over here to take a walk with me.”
“I wanted to apologize.”
Teddy stopped walking. “For what?”
“Don’t be dramatic. Come on.”
They kept walking in silence for a moment, and then Sophia said, “We were friends once, right?”
Sophia suddenly looked at her with so much energy that Teddy almost shrank away, but instead she looked back. “Yeah. Yeah, when we were kids.”
Sophia nodded. “We were.”
Teddy smiled, despite herself. “It was basically me and you against the world, right? After Dad left and Mom had to work so much.”
Sophia let out a tiny laugh. “Yeah. Well, it was me attempting to run a household and you shutting out the world with books.”
Teddy kept walking, watching her boots step over the cracks on the sidewalk.
“I don’t resent Mom for working so much—she didn’t really have a choice, you know? But sometimes I got tired of being the one who made dinner every night. The one who forged Mom’s signature on your permission slips. The one who calmed you down when you had nightmares. Sometimes . . . well, sometimes I just wanted to be sixteen.”
Teddy frowned. “I thought you were the coolest girl in the world back then. I wanted to be you.”
Sophia smiled skeptically. “Yeah? God, I didn’t even want to be myself. I wanted to have no responsibility, for even one day. And then when I went to college, it was like I got my wish. Sure, there was homework and exams and all that stuff, but I didn’t have to worry about making sure we sent in a check to the electric company. My roommate always complained about doing her own laundry, but I was, like, stoked that I didn’t have to do laundry for a family of three.”
Teddy didn’t say anything, and Sophia continued.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to come home more often. I wanted to see you. But every time I planned a weekend home, I started feeling all heavy and stressed out, because I knew if there was anything wrong at home, I’d be the one to take care of it.”
“You could’ve told me that,” Teddy said softly.
“I’m sorry, okay?” Sophia said forcefully. “I’m sorry I’m a shitty sister. I’m sorry we don’t have a relationship now and it’s my fault.”
Teddy thought about Sophia’s words for a moment. What she wanted to say was a bit of a risk, and it definitely scared her, so she opened her mouth and let the words come out. “Maybe we can try to have a relationship now.”
Sophia raised her eyebrows. “Yeah?” she asked hopefully.
Teddy nodded.
Sophia exhaled. “Great, because in that case I want to tell you that you’re making a huge mistake.”
Teddy frowned. “This is the relationship? You criticizing me? I thought maybe we’d go get a pedicure together or something.”
Sophia shoved her hands in her coat pockets and stared straight ahead. “Don’t get a job you don’t love to make someone else happy.”
Teddy couldn’t help herself; she laughed out loud. “Not all of us are like you, Sophia. You’ve been the golden child, the ‘most likely to succeed’ Phillips sister your whole life, while I’ve been—I don’t know—‘most likely to blend into the background.’ Some of us didn’t pop out of the womb wanting to be lawyers.”
“I don’t want to be a lawyer!” Sophia said so loudly that a man walking his dog across the street stopped and stared. Sophia waved at him and muttered, “Mind your own business.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Teddy said. “You’ve wanted to be a lawyer since we were kids. You’ve always been so good at arguing.”
“No, Mom wanted me to be a lawyer,” Sophia corrected her. “Don’t you remember what it was like after Dad left? Mom became a walking copy of whatever the nineties equivalent of Lean In was. She was always, like, researching colleges and buying me SAT prep software programs and talking about my big future as a powerful lawyer and it was . . . I don’t know. I didn’t realize I could want anything else, you know?”
Teddy nodded. They turned toward Grandview Avenue. Teddy crossed her arms and smiled at someone walking a greyhound.
“I remember what you were like when you were a little kid,” Sophia said as they walked past a hair salon. “You had so much energy, and you didn’t care what anyone thought. I was miserably full of hormones and I so admired that about you. It was like you weren’t concerned with impressing anyone; you were just yourself. You were . . .”
“Hell on wheels,” Teddy said quietly.
Sophia smiled. “Yeah, basically. But then, after Dad left, you changed.”
Teddy thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think you can be hell on wheels forever.”