Cecily arrived carrying a bag of apples and a grievance about a printer.
“It’s decided paper is optional,” she said, putting the bag on the kitchen counter. “You press print, it thinks about it, and then it informs you that the job is complete. No evidence. Pure confidence.”
“Have you tried turning it off?”
“Don’t.”
Annelise held up both hands.
“I’ve turned it off. Other people have turned it off. At this point it’s had more rest than any of us.”
“What are the apples for?”
“You. We bought too many.”
“How does that happen?”
“Hugo thought we didn’t have any. I thought we didn’t have any. Neither of us looked in the bowl.”
Annelise took one out. It was small and red with a bruise near the stem. She put it in her fruit bowl, then tipped the others in around it. There was something reassuring about a visit that began with surplus fruit rather than a request.
They had arranged it on Monday: half an hour at Annelise’s place so she could try the speech aloud without standing in the reception hall for the first attempt. She had imagined her sister sitting at the kitchen table, smiling at the right places. Now Cecily was taking off her jacket, asking for water, and looking tired enough that Annelise wondered whether to postpone.
“We don’t have to do this tonight.”
“I’m here.”
“You’ve had a long day.”
“I have a long day most days. Give me the water and your best two minutes.”
“It’s not finished.”
“Then your best unfinished two minutes.”
Annelise filled two glasses. Her phone lay on the table with the note open. She had changed the first paragraph six times since Sunday and liked none of the versions as much as she wanted to.
Cecily sat down and reached for an apple. “Do I have to look solemn?”
“Supportive.”
“I can do supportive.”
Annelise remained standing. That seemed closer to the circumstances in which she’d actually speak. She tucked her hair behind one ear, cleared her throat, and immediately felt ridiculous.
“You can just start,” Cecily said.
“Yes. Right.”
She looked at the screen.
“’When Cecily asked me to say a few words, I tried to think of a story that would explain what it means to be her sister. The trouble is, there are too many to choose from. We’ve always told each other everything, and—’”
“No,” Cecily said.
Annelise stopped.
“Sorry. But no.”
She lowered the phone. “You don’t like the opening?”
“We haven’t always told each other everything.”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“It isn’t. It’s a statement.”
Annelise felt heat rise into her face. She had invited this. She had asked her sister to listen and now disliked what listening had made possible.
“I don’t mean literally every single thing.”
“I know what you mean.” Cecily put the apple down. “You mean the sort of sisters who call each other when something happens, before they’ve worked out how to explain it. We haven’t been those sisters.”
The kitchen sounded abruptly too quiet. A car passed outside, its bass audible for a few seconds through the closed window.
“We talk,” Annelise said.
“Now. More now.”
“I called when I got divorced.”
“After you filed.”
Annelise looked at the phone. The paragraph was still there, waiting to resume. She could remove the sentence, keep the rest, thank Cecily for the correction. It would be a tidy solution to a problem that was no longer about the speech.
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
“I was an adult. I could have worried and still gone to work.”
She sat down.
Cecily rubbed a thumb over the mark her glass had left on the table. “I’m not asking for every private thing. I don’t need a transcript of your marriage. But you tell me when things have become a story you can manage. By then there’s nothing for me to do except react correctly.”
“That isn’t fair.”
“Some of it is.”
Annelise opened her mouth, then closed it. The anger was useful for a second; it offered energy, a way not to feel the smaller thing beneath it. Her sister had waited through years of edited news. Annelise could remember the calls, the brisk reassurance, the way she had kept moving while she spoke so no one could hear that she was standing still.
“Yes,” she said. “Some of it is.”
Cecily leaned back. Her expression had not softened into reward.
“Do you know how you broke up with Malcolm?” she asked.
Annelise stared at her. “Of course I know.”
“I mean, do you know what you told me?”
A hot little thread of shame moved through her. “That we wanted different things.”
“That it was better to finish it before you moved. Like you’d both made a sensible decision.”
“I don’t remember saying both.”
“You didn’t have to.”
The distinction was exact and unpleasant. Annelise set the phone facedown.
“I called him,” she said. “Before I left. It was short. I told him I didn’t want to keep doing it when I moved.”
Cecily waited.
“He wanted to try weekends. He was finishing his apprenticeship here. The training was only ninety minutes away. I made it sound impossible because I didn’t want to admit I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Being responsible if he was unhappy. Discovering I couldn’t be who he wanted and do what I wanted. Except he hadn’t asked me to choose.”
Her sister’s eyes moved briefly to the window, then back.
“He called again,” Annelise said. “Once. I didn’t answer.”
“Why?”
“Because I knew he’d be hurt. Because I didn’t want him to ask a question I couldn’t make myself answer.”
“God, Annelise.”
“I know.”
The words came out too quickly, an attempt to get ahead of whatever Cecily might say. Annelise pressed her palms against her knees.
“No,” she said. “You get to say it.”
Cecily shook her head. “I’m not sitting here to punish you for something you did to him. I just—why did you let me think it was mutual?”
“Because it sounded better.”
There it was, without fear dressed as wisdom or youth offered as acquittal. Her sister looked down at the apple between them.
“I was fifteen,” Cecily said. “I thought grown-up people made decisions like that. Calmly. Together. Then you were gone, and when I missed you, I felt childish.”
“You weren’t.”
“I know that now.”
Annelise swallowed. “I didn’t think about what it was like for you.”
“No. You didn’t.”
They sat without speaking. Annelise could see a damp patch on her sister’s sleeve where she’d rested it against the glass. There was a small run in the cuff, something she would ordinarily point out and offer to trim. She kept her hands still.
“I’m sorry I made you feel as though missing me was something to get over quietly,” she said.
Cecily’s mouth moved, but she didn’t answer at once.
“I used to save things to tell you,” she said. “Nothing important. A girl at school being awful. A film I wanted you to see. Then you would call and tell me about your training, and I’d forget how to start.”
Annelise looked down. She had remembered being lonely in Richmond as proof that leaving hadn’t been easy for her. She had rarely pictured the person at the other end of those calls collecting things she never got to say.
“I wish I’d asked.”
“So do I.”
There was no sentence available that would make the years shorter. Annelise reached for her glass, drank, and put it down carefully.
“Are you all right with Malcolm now?” Cecily asked.
“We’re trying.”
“Does he know this version?”
“He was there.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes. I’ve told him why. As well as I can. It doesn’t make the way I did it less hurtful.”
“Good.” Cecily caught herself. “I don’t mean good that it hurt.”
“I know.”
Her sister picked up the apple at last and took a bite. The small sound broke something in the room’s formality. Annelise found herself almost smiling, then didn’t because the moment wasn’t hers to lighten yet.
After a while Cecily said, “You can’t put all of this in the speech.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“I’m saying it anyway. I don’t want a public apology at my wedding. I don’t want everyone looking at us while we pretend a microphone has fixed our relationship.”
“No.”
“I want you there. With me. And I want you to know something about my life that isn’t a wedding deadline.”
Annelise looked up. “Then tell me something.”
Cecily gave a tired laugh. “Now I can’t think of anything. You’ve made it an examination.”
“Fair.”
She turned her phone over and opened the note again. The false sentence occupied less than two lines. She selected it. Her thumb hovered over delete, not because she believed it but because she liked the ease of saying it, the way it made them sound uncomplicated.
Then she removed it.
The paragraph left behind was broken in the middle. She did not immediately repair it.
“That’s gone,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Not the entire speech. The sentence.”
“I assumed.”
Annelise laughed, a small unsteady sound. Cecily smiled at her without granting absolution for every previous year. It was enough to make her shoulders loosen.
“Do you want something to eat?” Annelise asked. “Something that isn’t an apple you brought yourself?”
“I should go soon.”
“Toast?”
Cecily considered. “Toast would be good.”
They stood together in the little kitchen. Annelise put bread into the toaster while Cecily opened the refrigerator and asked where she kept the butter. She could have pointed. Instead she moved aside and let her sister find it.
The first two slices emerged too pale. Cecily pushed them down again, and they stood watching as if attention could improve the mechanism. Annelise wanted to apologize once more, for the calls, the leaving, the sentence. Instead she asked what had happened with the printer after it declared victory.
“We sent everything to the one upstairs,” Cecily said. “Which meant forty people walked through reception asking where their documents were. Tomorrow someone is going to tell me paperless offices are the future.”
“Will you hit them with a ream?”
“Only metaphorically.”
When the toast came up, one edge had burned. Cecily scraped it over the sink with the butter knife. Annelise watched the crumbs fall and felt an absurd gratitude for the mess.
At the door, she said, “Could we go for a walk on Sunday?”
“What needs picking up?”
“Nothing.”
“Where?”
“The reservoir path? If the weather’s decent.”
Cecily looked at her for a second. “Just a walk?”
“Just us. We can talk about your printer the entire way if you want.”
“I absolutely do not.”
“Then something else.”
Her sister put her jacket on. “Late morning?”
“Eleven?”
“Okay.”
Annelise opened the door. Cecily paused on the threshold and hugged her, quick and slightly awkward with the empty apple bag caught between them. Then she was gone, footsteps on the stairs.
The phone still lay on the table. Annelise looked at the unfinished paragraph, closed it, and added Sunday at eleven to her calendar.