The Summer We Got Free

by McKenzie, Mia

  That was a long time ago, though. A death ago. But lying there now, George was again struck by a suspicious quiet, and wary of what he did not hear. Regina’s mumbling was not wafting under the door, was not bumping up against the pillow he had over his head. George removed the pillow and listened. He knew she must be in the house, or out in the backyard, because she refused to go any farther than that on Saturday mornings. He got out of bed and went to the door, opening it a crack and listening. He could hear the faint sound of voices coming up from the kitchen and he thought one of the voices had an unfamiliar lilt to it, but that was a ridiculous thought to have because nobody ever came inside that house. George stepped out into the hallway and stood at the top of the stairs. Now he was sure of it. There was someone other than his family in the house. He couldn’t make out anything that was being said, but all of the voices sounded calm, conversational, so he knew it could not be one of their neighbors.

  He got dressed and brushed his teeth and hair, and when he got downstairs Sarah was coming out of the kitchen, and she was being followed by a woman. When they saw George, they stopped, and the woman smiled at him, with straight white teeth against the blackest skin he had ever seen.

  “Morning, Daddy,” Sarah said.

  “Morning. Who we got here?”

  “This is Paul’s sister. Helena. Helena, this my father, George Delaney.”

  “It’s good to meet you, Mr. Delaney,” she said.

  Her green eyes were striking against her skin and they met his with a kind of purpose George wasn’t used to and didn’t like, as if she was trying to see into and underneath him.

  “You, too,” George said, looking away from her at his daughter. “If this Paul sister, where he at?”

  “Still sleep.”

  “Well, where y’all going?” he asked.

  “I’m just showing Helena where the bathroom is.”

  “It’s right at the top of the stairs,” George said. “It aint the Taj Mahal, Sarah. It aint like she gone get lost.”

  While Helena found her way to the bathroom, George followed Sarah back into the kitchen. Ava was at the stove, stirring a pot of something steaming. Sarah went to the counter and started cracking eggs.

  "It's so exciting having company," she said. "After all this time. The last person who came over here for a meal was Paul. Maybe she'll end up staying, like her brother did."

  "Paul stayed for Ava," Regina said, from her seat at the table. "What in the world his sister gone stay for?"

  “Black as the day is long, aint she?" George asked, taking a seat at the table.

  Regina paused to glare at him a moment, not for any particular reason, just on general principle, before she pulled a pack of cigarettes, along with a book of matches, from her housecoat pocket.

  "You want coffee, Daddy?” Sarah asked.

  "Yes, thank you," George said. Then, "I didn't even know Paul had a sister. Did you know he had a sister, Ava?"

  "Yes.”

  "Well, she don't look nothing like him. I aint never seen anybody so black in my life. Y'all ever seen anybody so black?"

  They all shook their heads. None of them had ever seen anybody so black.

  When Helena wasn’t in the room, Ava felt a little better. Steadier. More like herself again. The strange emotions that had risen to her surface unswelled. For a few minutes. When Helena came back, the moment Ava turned to put the butter on the table and saw her coming through the kitchen door, she felt a trembling, and the butter dish shook in her hand.

  When breakfast was ready, they all sat down to eat, and Ava sat on the other side of the table from Helena, at the other end, putting as much space between herself and their guest as she could.

  Sarah was grinning around at all of them.

  “What you so happy about?” George asked.

  She shrugged. “This is nice. We don’t hardly never eat together like this, sitting at the table together like a real family, the way we used to. Usually everybody take a plate and go their separate way.”

  "This is a nice house," Helena said.

  Regina laughed. “Child, this house look like something out of a goddamn horror movie. But it’s nice of you to say so.”

  "How come the hedges aint been cut yet?" George asked. "That front yard’s starting to look as bad as the back. Paul was supposed to do that yesterday.”

  "That boy been working non-stop," Regina said. "He tired. Them hedges can wait."

  George frowned. "They high as my collar already. Tomorrow's Sunday. I don't want people walking by on they way to church seeing it like that."

  Regina put down her fork. “Why you give a damn what them people think about the hedges?”

  Ava saw Helena looking from George to Regina and back.

  "Paul aint had a day off in what?" Regina looked at Ava. "Two weeks?” She waved a dismissive hand at George. “Them hedges’ll be fine for another couple days. If you don’t like it, go cut ‘em your damn self."

  George glared at her. "Why you always—"

  "So, what's in New York?" Sarah asked Helena, loudly.

  George frowned and stabbed his fork into is eggs.

  "Work," Helena replied. “A friend of mine got me an interview in a couple of weeks at a school in Harlem,” Helena said. “Teaching art.”

  "You an artist?" Regina asked.

  “I’m not that much of one. But I know enough to teach children.”

  "I love art," Sarah said. She was sitting so far out on the edge of her chair, she looked ready to tip over.

  "Since when?” George asked.

  "I always have."

  "Ava the one used to paint," Regina said.

  Sarah frowned. "That was years ago.”

  Helena looked at Ava. “You paint?”

  Ava shook her head. "I just did it a little when I was a child, I guess.”

  Sarah raised her voice just a notch higher than Ava’s. "Was you and Paul close growing up?"

  Helena nodded. “We were best friends.”

  "Like Ava and Geo," Regina said.

  Helena looked at Ava again.

  "My brother," Ava explained.

  Sarah folded her arms across her chest. "He was my brother, too.”

  George got up from the table, taking his only-half-empty orange juice glass with him to the refrigerator, where he got out the jug and very slowly poured himself some more. Watching the dark yellow liquid as it streamed heavily into the glass, he wondered how long Paul’s sister would be visiting and hoped it would not be long. He didn’t like the disruption, the uncomfortable conversation, or the curiosity in that woman’s eyes.

  "Does your brother live here, too?" Helena asked Sarah.

  “Yeah, he do,” Regina said. She looked from Ava to Sarah. “Where’s your brother? I know he aint still sleep at this time of day.”

  Ava and Sarah did not have a brother anymore, but neither of them said a word and hoped the moment would pass without incident. It didn’t.

  “I better go wake him up,” Regina said, standing.

  Sarah and Ava both stood at the same time. Ava moved quickly to the kitchen door and stood in front of it.

  "Where you going, Mama?" Sarah asked, standing directly in front of Regina. “Why don’t you sit back down and finish your breakfast?”

  “No. I just said I’m gone go wake Geo up. Is you deaf, girl?” Regina grabbed her daughter’s shoulders and tried to move her aside. She was bigger than Sarah, but the younger woman held her ground.

  “You want to go back outside and see about your tomatoes?” Ava asked.

  Regina ignored Ava, her face growing strained and lined with the effort of trying to move Sarah, and Ava knew that any second her mother was going to snap and get angry and start screaming, or worse.

  “How about some peppermint tea, Mama?” Sarah asked.

  Regina stopped suddenly. She blinked. “Oh, yeah,” she said, releasing Sarah’s shoulders. “That sound good.”

  They were relieved to have figured out th
e One Thing. There was always something, one thing, that Regina really wanted at any given time. Ever since their mother had gone Saturday Morning Crazy, identifying that one thing was the only way they could get her to stop doing something they didn’t want her to be doing and get her to do something else.

  Sarah hurried to the stove and put on just enough water for one cup of tea, so it would boil faster. Ava helped Regina back into her chair.

  Still at the refrigerator with his orange juice, George, though he tried not to, could not help remembering how often he had gone into his son’s room on mornings like this, before school or church, to sometimes physically pull him from his bed, because the boy, from the time he was ten, refused to get up on time. “How you gone hold down a job if you can’t get your ass out of bed in the morning?” George had often asked him. “Lemme tell you something, boy. It’s always gone be somebody trying to lock you up, or kill you, and aint nobody ever gone give you nothing, so you better get ready to do for yourself, and that means getting up when it’s time to get up. You hear me?” But the boy had never learned. He had overslept, and been late for school, on the last morning he ever saw.

  1950

  When the Delaneys came to Radnor Street, on a Saturday in early fall of 1950, on a cloudy morning, several of their new neighbors stood at their front windows and watched them with a kind of interest that most of them could not quite understand. It was an interest that kept them rooted in place behind windowscreens, almost unable to look away from the young family, but which, at the same time, made them hesitate to go out and say hello.

  Maddy Duggard peered through her front window from across the street as they unloaded a car full of their belongings and through the steam coming up from her morning coffee she assessed them. The woman looked to be in her early twenties, though the coat she was wearing, a pretty purple dress coat with beige cuffs and a high, stylish collar, gave her an air of some maturity and sophistication, as did the way she walked and the way she held her shoulders. The man was thin and sandy, and he grasped their moving boxes with hands that were almost too large for his thin frame. A little girl sat on the front steps of the house, and two smaller children, a boy and girl, ran around on the porch. It was mostly the smallest girl who Maddy watched. Each time the child’s mother took a box from the back of the old pickup they had parked out front of the house, and carried it inside, the little girl followed her. Each time the child disappeared into the house, Maddy found herself staring at the doorway in anticipation, until she appeared again. There was something about that little girl that intrigued Maddy, though she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was. She did not know that a dozen of her neighbors were standing at the windows of their own houses, also watching this child, and trying to put their fingers on just that same thing. She also did not know the reason she remained at the window, and did not immediately go out and introduce herself to the family, as any good Christian, and any good neighbor for that matter, would. Standing there, she told herself that she would go over, in just a minute. She told herself that for half an hour.

  Through the window, she saw Malcolm Hansberry, her two-doors-down neighbor, climb over the banister of the house that separated theirs and knock on her front door. “Come on in, Malc,” she hollered.

  “You been watching them, too?” Malcolm asked when he saw Maddy at the window. “That explains why you aint ready.”

  She looked at him, then remembered. “Oh shit! The leadership meeting.”

  Malcolm took her place at the window while she went to throw something on and pin up her hair. He had spent several minutes staring out of his own window at the new family moving in and it was only because he had to get ready for the meeting at the church that he hadn’t gone over and introduced himself and offered to help with the boxes. At least that’s why he figured he hadn’t gone over. Pastor Goode always asked that they be on time for the meeting and Malcolm didn’t like to keep people waiting when they were expecting him. It was bad manners. So, he had watched the young family while dressing, so as not to lose any time. There was something about that littlest girl, he had thought, standing at his window, and now thought again, standing at Maddy’s window, that made him feel happy as he watched her running around, something that reminded him of the very tops of very green trees, something that recalled for him the yellow taffy his favorite aunt used to make. That something made him want to go over and say hello to the family, made him eager to do so, but still he stood there.

  Maddy came back a couple of minutes later and soon she and Malcolm left the house and walked down the front steps to the sidewalk, headed for the church. Looking over at the small girl running around in circles, her arms outstretched as though she were pretending to fly, both Malcolm and Maddy felt a strange, almost physical tug, like the feeling of being moved by the wind at your back, only this wind seemed not to push but to pull, and without either of them suggesting it to the other, each altered their course mid-step and crossed the narrow street.

  “Well, hi there,” Maddy called as she approached the pick-up truck.

  The children’s mother, who was pulling a box from the bed of the truck, smiled and said, “Good morning.” She was a little bit taller than Maddy and built like a country girl, with broad hips and thick calves. Her hands were elegant, long and thin. She had a wonderful face, with cheekbones cut like a cliffside, and her dark skin was the most flawless Maddy had ever seen.

  “I heard somebody bought this house. I’m Maddy Duggard. I live right here.” She pointed over her shoulder to the white house she and Malcolm had just exited. “This here’s Malcolm Hansberry.”

  “I live in the green one,” he said, pointing to his own house.

  “Nice to meet you both,” said the woman, smiling, revealing a little space between her two front teeth. “I’m Regina Delaney.”

  She had a heavy southern accent that sounded Alabama-esque to Malcolm and Georgia-ish to Maddy. “Where you from?” Maddy asked.

  “Georgia.”

  “Thought so.”

  “But we been up here about five years now,” Regina told them. “We was living over on Highland Avenue. And y’all?”

  “I’m from here,” Malcolm said. “Maddy’s from Chicago.”

  “I moved up here two years ago with my husband and our children. My husband moved back a year and a half ago,” Maddy said, smiling.

  “Was that a good thing?” Regina asked.

  “If that’s my only choice, I’ll say good, but really it was a wonderful thing,” Maddy said, and all three of them laughed.

  The children came down off the porch to investigate their new neighbors and Regina told Maddy and Malcolm their names and ages. Sarah was six, long-limbed and pretty, and she smiled politely at them. Ava and George Jr. were four year-old twins. George Jr., who was nicknamed Geo, was chubby-cheeked and had a quiet curiosity in his eyes as he looked up at Maddy. “How are you?” he asked her, not in the way children usually asked that, not as if he was simply saying words he had learned to say when greeting someone, but with a kind of attention and concern that Maddy had never felt coming from a child. The question felt so genuine that Maddy could not give a standard answer such as just fine or good, thank you, baby, without feeling as if she were lying, so she said the truth, which was, “I think I’m mostly okay.”

  Ava had large, heavy-lashed eyes and her knees were covered with scabs, some of them freshly picked-at. Up close, she was even more transfixing. There was a hum about her, almost a glow, almost a whisper, but neither of those things entirely; something unnameable that seemed to radiate from her. It warmed them up in the chilly autumn air and caused a little laugh to come up out of Maddy, unexpected.

  “Oh,” Maddy said. “I felt so happy all of a sudden.”

  Ava grinned at them, revealing the same small space between her two front teeth as her mother, and said, “Y’all got cookies?”

  “Ava, go somewhere, please,” Regina said.

  Ava frowned up at her, the
n skipped away, back up onto the porch, and both Maddy and Malcolm watched her as she went. Neither found it easy to look away from her. When Regina leaned down into the truck bed to retrieve another box, Maddy and Malcolm each grabbed one, too, and followed her up the steps.

  The layout of the house was the same as every other house on the block. They entered into a small foyer that led to a short hallway, off of which there was a living room, a dining room, and, at the back of the house, a good-sized kitchen. Stairs led from the foyer up to the second floor. Neither Malcolm nor Maddy knew who had owned the house before, because no one had lived in it since either of them had been on the block, but whoever they were, they sure seemed to like red.

  “I never seen so many red walls,” Malcolm said.

  “It’s one of the reasons we settled on the house,” said Regina. “Ava loves color. The more of it she can get, the happier she is. If it aint no color on the walls, she’ll put some on them, with crayons, or my lipstick, or whatever she can think of. This way saves us a lot of headaches.”