60
Now Teddy understood why people had hobbies—they gave you something to pour yourself into when you otherwise felt too miserable to function. She could think about her life, or she could knit while watching a Rock Hudson marathon on Turner Classic Movies.
This explanation wasn’t exactly comforting to Eleanor and Kirsten, who both kept checking in on her, but now Eleanor was at work and Kirsten was doing a consultation with a client, so Teddy was free to lounge on the couch without their worried faces occasionally appearing in front of her. Of course she knew they meant well, but what did they want her to do? Get up and perform one of the dance numbers from Singin’ in the Rain? She felt like a piece of hot garbage and she intended to stay on this couch all day, making a wonky scarf (she’d learned knitting from a YouTube tutorial, but her skills left much to be desired) and admiring Rock Hudson’s glorious chin while taking advantage of all that the ice cream freezer had to offer.
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.”
“Maybe we should try, though,” Sophia said. “I wish I had a little bit of that young Teddy spirit.”
Teddy frowned. “So do you really not want to be a lawyer? Seriously?”
Sophia shook her head vigorously. “No. Craig keeps telling me I should quit and go back to school, that we have money saved up. He always says you shouldn’t spend your life following someone else’s dream.”
“Craig said that, huh?” Teddy asked, nodding slowly. Apparently he held hidden depths when he wasn’t shoveling food into his mouth. “So what do you want to do?”
“I want to be a teacher,” Sophia said. “A high school teacher. Is that ridiculous?”
Teddy smiled. “No, Sophia. It’s not ridiculous at all.”
Sophia sighed. “You don’t want to run a toy store, do you? I’ve never once heard you say that was your dream.”
Teddy could feel herself getting defensive, but willed herself to push her shoulders down and take a deep breath. “Maybe life isn’t always about dreams, though. Maybe it’s about making the best of what’s in front of you.”
Sophia chewed on her lip. “Yeah. You’re right; sometimes it is. But I don’t think that’s the situation you’re in, and I don’t think you want to do this. Rarely is there a situation where your only choice is to run a vintage toy store.”
Despite herself, Teddy smiled. “Well, thanks for the advice.”
Sophia groaned. “I’m sorry. I’m being annoying. It’s just . . . I care about you, okay? And while I’m on a roll . . . what happened to that guy?”
“Everett?” Teddy asked. “Well . . . I kind of broke up with him.”
Sophia frowned. “Why?”
Teddy sighed. “He has a big life, you know? Big dreams. Big goals. And I don’t know if I can handle that again. I don’t want to lose myself in someone else.”
Sophia thought about it for so long that Teddy thought she wasn’t going to respond, but then she said, “Yeah, but you only lost yourself in Richard because he sucked. When it’s really love, you don’t have to lose yourself. Falling in love should make you more yourself.”
“Maybe instead of becoming a teacher, you should start writing self-help books,” Teddy joked, and Sophia elbowed her. But Teddy’s mind snagged on her words. Was Sophia right? Was there a way she could be with Everett without losing herself in the process?
But then she realized where they were and stopped walking. “Did you see that we’re right in front of Jeni’s?”
Sophia glanced up at the sign and her face looked exactly the same as it had when they were kids and she saw ice cream. “Well, we have to go in, right?”
Teddy nodded. “I don’t see any other option.”
AFTER SHE GOT back home, Teddy spent the rest of her afternoon cleaning up. She still needed to keep busy to avoid thinking about Everett, but luckily going through the boxes of clothes she had brought from the town house kept her occupied.
When her phone rang that evening, just as it was getting dark, she frowned. It was an unknown number, so she answered it, reasonably sure it wouldn’t be Everett or Richard.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me.”
Teddy paused for a moment, running through the list of male voices that could be calling her from a number she didn’t recognize. “Um . . . I’m sorry, who is this?”
“Carlos!”
“Oh,” Teddy said.
And then she realized that Carlos wasn’t calling her to shoot the breeze, because he didn’t shoot any breezes that weren’t vintage toy related. “Carlos, what’s wrong?”
“Josie’s in the hospital,” he said. “I’m here now. Can you—”
“I’m coming,” Teddy said, then hung up.