“Well, I think it’s time for tea, don’t you?”
Cynthia Sutherland asks this question of the table exactly one hundred and twenty minutes after our arrival at the Sutherland family home, a small, well-maintained ranch in a somewhat run-down northeast Maryland suburb. Normally, counting the minutes—okay, counting anything, really—isn’t my style, but over the last two hours I’ve learned, bit by bit, how keeping track of numbers might be important in a household like this one.
Mostly it’s a matter of the residents themselves. Cynthia, Reid’s mom—a petite, smiling woman with a head full of dark curls who retired from her job as a high school teacher only last year—has the kind of time-aware, resources-aware efficiency of a woman who has raised seven children in a three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom house. In her kitchen, every move she makes seems calculated to get the most from the space; at her dining table, every turn in conversation she directs seems calculated for balance, for making sure no one dominates. Maybe it ought to seem disconcerting, too mechanical, but somehow it doesn’t. It only seems as though you’ve been put in the hands of someone capable and kind, someone who wants to make the most of her time with you.
Thomas Sutherland—a man who looks so like an older version of Reid that I’d stammered in shock at his initial, sternly put “Good afternoon” to me—is more literally a numbers guy, an accountant who works out of a tidy home office at the front of the house. He’s quiet, observant, blunt when he speaks, and within three minutes of learning about my work he asked me whether I was careful about the deductions I took for my supplies. My lips had quirked in a smile, my eyes catching Reid’s across the table, and for a second I think we’d both forgotten about numbers, remembering instead letters he once wrote to me:I was nervous.
Finally, there’s Reid’s sister, Cady. Twenty years old with long hair in mermaid shades of pink, blue, and purple, a dye job that would cost hundreds of dollars at even the cheapest salons in New York, and only six months to go in the cosmetology program she’s in. Cady—bright and talkative and obviously something of a mystery to her more reserved parents and brother—counts herself in years of distance from her older siblings, none of whom are here for our spontaneous visit. Eight years younger than the youngest, Seth; ten years from Ryan; eleven years from Reid; thirteen from Owen; sixteen from the twins, Connor and Garrett. These numbers, it’s clear, matter to her, some way that she defines herself in relation to siblings who are so much older than her, and even though I don’t have any experience with that kind of count, I get the sense that in her adolescent years, Cady probably felt very much like an only child.
To that, I can definitely relate.
“My mom always has tea after a meal,” Cady says to me now, by way of explanation. If Cady is a mystery to her parents, it’s clear she knows they might be a mystery to a guest, and since I’ve arrived, she’s made herself something of a guide to me, dropping in context at any possible moment of confusion. When Reid softly asks Cady about some paperwork related to her school, she proudly (and loudly) announces to me that Reid pays her tuition. When Thomas silently hands Reid a quarter-folded section of the newspaper, Cady rolls her eyes and explains that Thomas does a Challenger game in there every day, something Reid got him into a couple of years ago after a back injury.
“Now I see where he gets it,” I say, smiling at Reid again as we all stand. I watch every Sutherland around this table stack and gather their two lunch plates and their three pieces of silverware in the exact same way, and I quietly mimic it, inwardly charmed by all the tiny signs being revealed to me, all the codes that seem to lead me right to the heart of Reid, the everyday habits that help make up who he is.
It’s surprising, I guess, that I haven’t felt more nervous, more of an interloper here. But after last night—all my tearful revelations to Reid, all the trust I’d put in him—I get a strange sense about this visit. Maybe we both know it’s all too soon, but Reid has brought me here to give me something back, some comparable level of exposure to what I gave to him. The drive would have been enough to make me feel better, more stable about what had happened with Sibby—the snacks he stopped to get me after we picked up the rental car, the way he chuckled at my pop-song singing, the lines of his face when he wears a pair of sunglasses, the hand he kept on my thigh as we sped along the highway, finding signs. But the addition of this visit has been the most tender, vulnerable offering. Reid giving me something I didn’t even know I needed.
We settle in the small living room, meticulous and symmetrical, for tea. On the wall across from where I sit is a gallery of Sutherland family photos—several that show the family’s growth over time, expanding by an order of small, chubby baby every other photo or so. The most recent ones are almost class-photo-like in their population—all of Reid’s siblings, but also various partners and children. None of them, I notice—with a not-small amount of relief—feature Avery.
“Thomas and I both came from large families,” Cynthia says to me, when she catches me looking. “I know it seemed silly, to a lot of people, that we had so many children.” She hands me a cup of tea, her cheeks flushing in the exact same spot Reid’s do.
“I don’t think it’s silly,” I say, even though I definitely want to get ten extra birth-control shots at the very thought of it. “I think it looks like it would’ve been fun.”
“Fun,” Thomas says, deadpan.
Reidswoonshes, hides it by taking a sip of his tea.
“We always planned it,” Cynthia says, sending a warning—but somehow still loving and indulgent—glance Thomas’s way.
“I mean,” Cady says, laughing, “Idefinitely wasn’t planned.” I smile over at her. “Me neither.”
“You know, what you really want to see isthis,” Cady says, leaning forward to pull a photo album from the lower shelf of the coffee table.
“Cady,” Reid says.
“This is payback. Recall your visit home on the weekend of my senior prom.”
Reid’s face goes stern. “He needed a reminder,” is all he says, stern and protective, and I feel an inconvenient pulse of desire.
Involuntarily, my eyes drift to his brow, unstitched now but still bisected by the tiny line of his mostly healed cut. He seems to notice, raising that eyebrow at me in gentle teasing, as though he can read my mind.
I turn my focus to the photo album, my face heating. “Anyway,” Cady says, directing her mom to sit on the other side of me. Within seconds I’ve set my tea down—the truth is, it still has the taste of gardening to me—and I have the photo album in my lap, Cady and Cynthia providing commentary on the assembled pictures. I try to keep my mind only on the details they’re happily sharing with me, but really I’m distracted by the flush of warmth I feel at being included in this specific way, the way that says,Welcome to our family history.
I spell to myself, just in case.
But when Cady turns the page from the set of pictures featuring Reid as a baby, I feel my heart squeeze from the loops of that other, more-than-L-I-K-EI try so hard to ignore.
“Oh,” I say softly, staring down at the photo in front of me.
It’s Reid as a small, small boy, maybe at five or six. His cheeks are pink, his hair closer to red than the reddish-blond it is now. I can’t see the blue of his eyes because he has them squeezed tightly shut, and that’s because his smile is so, so big, his top and bottom baby teeth showing, bright white and even, slim spaces between them. He looks small and joyful, full of a feeling too big for his body, and in his hands he clutches a miniature chalkboard bearing his name.
Written inbubble letters.
“I did this for all the kids on their first day of school,” Cynthia says, pointing to it. “Not very expert, compared to what you do!”
“No,” I say, transfixed by the image. “It’s wonderful.” I can’t help but laugh. “Bubble letters! It suits him.”
I never would have thought it, only a couple of months ago—serious, sans serif Reid. But itdoessuit him. Here, he looks fair to bursting with happiness, the colorful straps of his little-boy backpack like banners of celebration.
