“He was so excited for school,” Cynthia says. “He couldn’twaitto start.”
Across the room, Reid clears his throat, and I look up to see him turning his teacup one-quarter. I remember that day in the city, another time when Reid offered something else of himself to comfort me.I was difficult in school, he’d said. I lower my eyes back to the picture, feeling a pang for the way this little boy’s excitement was quashed by everyone who didn’t try to understand him.
“He wanted to be a teacher,” Cady says. “Did he tell you that?”
She doesn’t say it as if it’s a test, as if it’s somehow the way she’s going to see whether I ought to be taken seriously here as a possible girlfriend to Reid. Still, it feels important, a piece of Reid’s history I’ve been missing.
So I look up at him, instead of answering her.
“You wanted to be a teacher?”
He shifts in his chair, that slight flush on his cheeks. “Yes.” He pauses, swallows. “Later, a . . . a professor.”
I notice Thomas, sitting in a chair matching Reid’s, take a sip of his tea before turning his sharp-edged profile to the window. For a fleeting moment I feel a stretch of time collapse, and I’m back in that Nolita restaurant, seeing the look on Reid’s face when he’d first told me about John Horton Conway and his math-making games.
“What changed?” I say.
Thomas looks back at me, the corner of his mouth twitching. For the most part, he’s been polite but cautious with me today, a fact that felt, if not wholly comfortable, at least familiar. It figures that the first noticeably positive response I’d get out of him would be for asking such a direct question.
No one even tries to answer for Reid. Thomas turns his teacup one-quarter, a tiny clink breaking the silence.
“My math skills are better than my people skills,” Reid finally says. “I wasn’t very successful as a TA.”
“Weren’t you”—I pause, because my counting skills aren’t any quicker from being in this house for a single afternoon—“nineteen when you started graduate school?”
“Eighteen,” Thomas says, his voice clipped.
“I finished college in three years,” Reid clarifies for me.
“So . . . probably about the same age as the students you were teaching?”
Reid shrugs. “I moved into research positions later. It was a better fit.”
My eyes drift back down to the photo album in my lap, to little boy Reid and his too-big backpack and too-big smile. That bubble-lettered chalkboard clutched in his tiny hands.
“I thought he should have kept trying,” says Thomas, and I look up again, noticing the stiff tension between the two of them.
“I thought I should make money,” Reid replies.
“You’ve been there for six years,” Thomas says. I think I catch something, some brief movement of his eyes down to Reid’s arms, to the skin there. “You’ve made enough money.”
I look back and forth between them, some distant awareness that I’m too invested in this to be uncomfortable about it, to feel my usual apprehension over this kind of simmering conflict. Instead I’m thinking about how odd it is—to see Reid be so stalwart about his work, about making money. In the city, with me, his disdain for both has been so pointed, so consistent. And how odd it is that Thomas seems to know nothing about what Reid has been telling me since the very first day we got reacquainted: that his time in New York—becauseof his disdain for both of these things—is nearly up.
Reid clears his throat again, and for a split second our gazes tangle, and I get that sense again.This is for you, his eyes tell me.This is because I trust you, the way you trusted me.
Maybe it’s not a smiling moment, with all this tense energy in the air, but I send him a soft smile anyway. I don’t bother trying to ignore theor what it stands for.
“Not this again,” says Cady, exasperated.
“Gosh,really,” adds Cynthia, her voice all at once annoyed and amused.
Thomas says nothing, but he does send an apologetic look Reid’s way, and with that, it’s over, this obviously recurring flare in their family. Nobody seems particularly bothered; nobody tries to leave the room or pick another fight. Nothing essential between them—their trust in each other, their love for each other—seems shaken, and I clutch this observation to myself, something else Reid and his family have given me today. Some knowledge, some hope that eventually, Sibby and I will be able to talk about this difficult thing between us again, and that it won’t spell the end of us, the end of our friendship, the end of our chosen family.
I blink down at the photo album, collecting myself. Maybe my companions notice, but no one seems to mind. Cady simply turns the page, and Cynthia starts telling me about the next picture, and just like that, I somehow get the sense I’m now one of their number.
“So, this is your bedroom.”
“This is myoldbedroom,” Reid says.
