The Summer We Got Free

by McKenzie, Mia

  The kitchen door swung open and the sandy man with the large hands waved at them as he came into the foyer. “Morning.”

  From her window, Maddy had judged him to be four or five years older than his wife and up close that estimate seemed right. He was tall and narrow-shouldered, nice-looking in spite of having big, almost bulgy eyes, and he had a smile that was friendly and seemed to hold back at the same time. He said his name was George Delaney, and Maddy and Malcolm introduced themselves.

  “What brought y’all up here from Georgia?” Malcolm asked them.

  “Oh, you know,” George said. “It’s more opportunity up here. White folks down there do everything they can to keep us from having anything.”

  Maddy shrugged. “White folks up here aint much better.”

  “They aint much better nowhere,” George said, and they all laughed and nodded agreement on that.

  “What y’all do for work?” Maddy asked.

  “I’m in the streets department,” George said.

  “Working for the city?” Malcolm said. “That’s a good deal.”

  “Regina works for some white folks out in Springfield, but it’s a little far from here. Y’all know anybody closer to this area looking for help?”

  Malcolm didn’t, but Maddy thought she might know somebody. Jobs were hard to come by, though, and she thought a favor like that might be better saved for someone she knew longer than a few minutes. Just as that thought was occurring to her, Ava ran by at full speed towards the kitchen and Maddy felt warmed up again. “I know a lady over in Bala Cynwyd looking for kitchen help,” she said. “I’ll introduce you to her.”

  “Oh, thank you,” said Regina, looking thrilled.

  There was a tap-tapping on the screen door behind them and they all turned to see what looked like a little white girl standing with her face to the screen, her hand cupped over her eyes, trying to see inside. “Hello!” she called. “Is Maddy and Malc in there?”

  Regina went and opened the screen door. The grown woman standing there was not white, but light-skinned with dyed red hair, and she was so short that she barely reached past the doorknob.

  “Oh. Hi. I’m Doris Liddy. How you?”

  She had seen Malcolm and Maddy making their way over to their new neighbors and had come over to remind them that they were due at the church. “Pastor hold a meeting every second Saddy morning with the leaders of the church groups,” she explained to Regina, once she had been invited in. “Maddy and Malc is co-secretaries of the events board. I’m vice president of the women’s group. Y’all been over to the church yet?”

  “We planning on attending service tomorrow,” George told her.

  “Oh, good. It’s always good to know God-fearing folks. In the city, you never know how people is, and I don’t trust nobody that don’t go to church.”

  “Doris, you don’t hardly trust nobody that do,” Maddy said.

  Doris shrugged. “Well, like I say, in the city you just never know.” Doris really never knew about people in the city, the country, or anywhere else. She was a naturally suspicious person and she expected that wherever people were gathered wrong-doing was taking place in some form or another. Her mother always used to say that the only thing more suspicious than a whole bunch of coloredfolks together in one place that wasn’t a church was one white man by himself, anywhere. She never said how suspicious a whole bunch of white men were together, because she didn’t have to.

  Ava ran in from the kitchen, sounding all by herself like a herd of cattle on the wood floor, and Doris feared the little girl would run right into her and knock her down, before she stopped abruptly beside her mother. She looked up at Doris and didn’t say anything.

  Doris had also been among the dozen or so residents of Radnor Street watching from windows as the Delaneys moved in. She, too, had been unsure about going over to say hello, but unlike Maddy and Malcolm, she knew exactly why. It was this child. There was something about this child, something about the way she played, that Doris didn’t like. It was in the way she ran, so fast and uncontrolled. It was in the reach of her arms as she spun herself around, unconcerned with bumping into things. It was in the spring of her knees as she jumped up and down on the sidewalk, not caring that if she fell it would be a hard landing. In all her movements, there was no restraint. She played as though she had no fear of falling. Doris had known that quality in younger children, babies just walking. But by this child’s age, fear was supposed to have taught itself to her, and should have been present in her play. But it wasn’t. That seemed to Doris to be disrespectful. To whom, she had not decided. God, maybe. Or her parents, whose job it was to keep her safe. How could you keep safe a child who played without fear? Doris didn’t like it. She didn’t like it from the start.

  She had been raised, though, not to insult people, or their children, in their own house. So, when Maddy smiled down at the child and said, “Aint she something?” Doris nodded, without saying just what she thought that something was.

  “Well, I’ll be sure to let Pastor Goode know we got another nice, God-fearing family on the block. Matter fact,” Doris told them, “I’ll ask him to make some time to meet y’all before service tomorrow.”

  “That’s nice of you,” Regina said.

  George nodded. “We happy to have such friendly neighbors.”

  A strange thing happened when George said the word we. He did not look directly at his wife, but only glanced emptily in her general direction, almost as if the word and the reality were not really connected in his mind, and Doris would have almost been confused as to what “we” he was even talking about if Regina hadn’t nodded in agreement and smiled when he said it.

  1976

  George was glaring at Regina across the kitchen table. Regina was muttering to herself. Sarah was talking with her mouth half-full of food. Ava was sipping her coffee and looking bored. This was the scene that Paul walked in on and it was perfectly familiar, the same sort of thing you’d witness walking into the Delaney kitchen on any Saturday morning, though sometimes George would be sneering instead of glaring, Regina would be screaming rather than muttering, Sarah would be talking with her mouth entirely full rather than half-full, and Ava would be looking distracted rather than bored, which was the subtlest of differences.

  He was still half-asleep and groggy, his exhaustion like a fog in his brain, and when he came into the room he did not see, at first, what was different about the scene, what was anything but familiar. It wasn’t until he had blinked a few times that he realized that Ava didn’t look bored at all, but rather uneasy. It was only after he had rubbed some of the sleep from his eyes that he saw that Sarah wasn’t talking with food in her mouth, but rather laughing. He had to listen more closely to hear that Regina wasn’t muttering to herself, but was speaking calmly. And it wasn’t until he took a few more sluggish steps and could see down to the other end of the table that he realized George was not glaring at Regina at all, but at a woman who Paul was sure he was imagining, a vision from some half-finished dream.

  “Paul,” Sarah said, “you up.”

  Everyone at the table turned and looked at him.

  “You got company,” George said.

  His sister stood up and took a few steps toward him. “Paul. I know I’m the last person you expected to see.”

  She had barely changed in twenty years. She was still built like a twelve year-old. Thin and flat-chested, with knobby knees beneath the hem of her skirt. Her black black skin was black as ever, her hair kinky and as short as his own, and he could almost swear that the black, horn-rimmed glasses she wore were the same ones she’d had at twelve. She couldn’t be real, he thought. He shook his head, and waited for the dream to fade away.

  “Paul, what the hell’s the matter with you?” Regina said. “You going nutty or something?”

  Paul looked at his mother-in-law. “What?”

  “It’s your sister. Aint you gone say hello?”

  The sleep-fog lifted and Paul star
ed wide-eyed at Helena. “It is you,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Aint this something?” Sarah asked.

  The smile that pulled across Paul’s face felt tight, almost painful. “Yeah, it’s something, alright.”

  “I know you weren’t expecting to see me,” Helena said again.

  He shook his head. “How’d you know where to find me?”

  “I asked around the old block. Somebody knew somebody who knew where you lived.” She smiled. “You look just the same.”

  He was sure he looked nothing like his scrawny, fifteen-year-old self. He looked around at all of them at the table, at their half-eaten breakfasts. “How long you been here?”

  “Not long. I didn’t want to wake you, and Sarah said you’d be up soon.”

  He wouldn’t have gotten up at all, would have slept for hours more, if not for the fact that the temperature in the house had risen so much that he’d woken up dripping sweat and couldn’t get back to sleep.

  “You hungry?” George asked. “Ava, get the man something to eat.”

  “That’s okay, baby, I aint hungry,” Paul said to Ava, who hadn’t moved anyway. “Where you been living?" he asked his sister.

  “Baltimore,” she said. "After Uncle Reese died, Aunt Vicky moved down there to be closer to her family, and she took me with her."

  "Uncle died, huh?"

  She nodded. "Stroke."

  "That's a shame," he said, and wondered if he sounded sincere.

  “She on her way to New York,” Sarah said. “For a teaching job.”

  “You a teacher?” he asked. “A real one?”

  “Sure.”

  “You went to college, then?”

  She nodded.

  This time his smile came easy.

  “Y’all sit down,” Regina said. “You know I don’t like people hovering around the table like that.”

  Helena took her seat and Paul went and grabbed an extra chair from the dining room and placed it next to Ava. "I'm surprised anybody from the old block knows where I am,” he said. “I aint been back around the neighborhood much since right after I turned eighteen. Without you and Mama there it aint feel like home no more. Which was real bad for me, 'cause I was dying for a little bit of home right then."

  "Well, it looks like you found it," Helena said, glancing at her brother’s wife. She asked how long Ava and Paul had been married and what they both did for work. When Paul said they’d both worked at the art museum, and that Ava still did, Helena said, "I tried to get a job there when I was a teenager. My best friend worked there and she talked me up to her boss. He hired me over the phone. But when he saw me, he changed his mind. He said I was so black I'd distract people from the art. He said that to my friend, not to me. He told me he'd forgotten he'd promised the job to somebody else."

  George looked down at his plate.

  Sarah shifted her weight on her chair, then reached for her coffee.

  Paul remembered the trouble his sister’s skin had caused them as children, the fights he got into almost daily in her defense, the fights she got into herself.

  "Does my brother ever talk about me?" Helena asked Ava, glancing at Paul.

  “Of course I do,” Paul said. “That’s a silly question.”

  “I aint heard you mention her but two or three times,” Regina said. “In what? Five years?”

  “Mama, drink your tea,” Sarah said. “It’s getting cold.”

  When they were done eating breakfast, Helena went to use the bathroom, and the second she was gone, Sarah cornered Paul at the sink, where he was stacking plates. “Aint you gone ask your sister to stay?”

  “What you mean, stay? She on her way to New York for a job.”

  “Yeah, and she said that interview aint for two weeks. I know she’d like to stay for at least a few days. You aint seen her in nearly twenty years. You’d feel awful if you let her go away from you again so soon.”

  “Sarah, stop telling people how they supposed to feel,” George said. “If Paul don’t want her here, that’s his business.”

  “It aint that I don’t want her here—”

  “But they ought to spend at least a week catching up,” Sarah said.

  “Three seconds ago it was a few days,” George said, “now it’s a week?”

  Paul shook his head. “I won’t have no time to spend with her. I’m working every day and almost every night.”

  Sarah waved a dismissive hand. “I got the weekend off, and Ava’s off Monday. We can take care of her when you aint here. Can’t we, Ava?”

  Ava shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess. If that’s what Paul wants.”

  He mistook her unusual uneasiness for her usual indifference and in this matter it was welcome. He didn’t want to be pressured about this. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his sister, that he hadn’t missed her, but he knew it seemed that way. Sarah was peering at him and he knew she was wondering why he was so reluctant. It just wasn’t right to see your only sister again after so many years and not be happy. It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy. It wasn’t that.

  ***

  Paul opened the windows in every room, and the back door, trying to lure a breeze. He had never known it to be so hot inside that house. It was always cold in there, even in summer. He sat with his sister at the kitchen table, smoking and listening to her tell about Baltimore, piecing in some of the parts of her life that he had missed. George had said he was going to read the paper and left. When Ava and Sarah finished cleaning up, Ava left, too, mumbling something about housework, but Regina and Sarah stayed, and it was mostly Sarah who asked questions and engaged Helena, while Paul listened. She told them how she had put herself through college while working for a doctor’s family, helping the wife, who was sickly, with their four children. After she had finished school, she had started teaching third grade and had taught it for four years before leaving.

  “Aint you gone miss your students?” Sarah asked her.

  “Yes. But it was time to move on,” she said. “And I’ve always wanted to move back to New York. I lived there for a couple of years when I was in my early twenties.” She looked at her brother then. “What about you, Paul? Have you been in Philadelphia all this time?”

  He nodded. “I thought about moving somewhere else after I…well, when I turned eighteen. But everybody I knew was here, and I guess I aint much of a wanderer.”

  “A little wandering can be good for the soul, I think,” Helena said. “But so can the places you know, the places that know you.”

  “I don’t know about Philly being good for nobody’s soul,” Paul said. “But the cheesesteaks is good.”

  They all laughed at that, including Regina, who was still sitting at the table. They looked over at her and it was plain that she wasn’t laughing with them. She was still staring down into the cup of peppermint tea that Sarah had reminded her to drink half an hour ago. She hadn’t looked up from it in all that time. They heard her say something that sounded like, “Maddy, I miss you.”

  “Is your mother alright?” Helena whispered.

  Sarah shook her head no and glanced at the clock on the wall above the kitchen door. “But she ought to be pretty soon.”

  “Paul, why don’t we take a walk,” Helena said. “Would you mind, Sarah? If I had a little time alone with my brother?’

  “Oh. I guess not.”

  Paul frowned. Walking was the last thing he felt like doing. Next to being alone with his sister.

  There was history in the peppermint tea. There was years ago in it. Staring down into it, Regina could see people and things long gone. Right there on the surface of the tea, she could see the kitchen reflected, but it was not the kitchen where she now sat. Gathered around the table were her children, all three of them together as they had not been in almost twenty years. A younger incarnation of Regina herself stood by the stove, watching them, and the lack of worry, the absence of fear in that Regina's eyes made the Regina sitting at the table want to call out to he
r other self, to ask her how she dared look so unafraid when the end of the world was coming. She opened her mouth to say something to her, something like, "Why don’t you see?" but the image in the teacup changed then, and instead of her children around the table she saw Maddy's face. Her old friend, smiling and laughing, the way Maddy always used to, as if she'd just told one of those raunchy stories she always liked to tell about her good for nothing ex-husband, the laughter causing her shoulders to shake as she threw her head back. "Maddy," Regina whispered to her, "I miss you, girl." But the Maddy in the tea could not hear her. Regina hunched down closer to the cup and watched the image on the tea's surface change again. Reflected there now was the main sanctuary of Blessed Chapel Church of God, on a Sunday, packed with worshippers, all of them on their feet and clapping as the choir sang, feet stomping and tambourines shaking and arms reaching up in exaltation. The light through the stained-glass windows threw sunstreaked color on the heads of the congregation, who sang and shouted about the glory of the Lord. Regina could not hear the song, but the movement of the bodies sounded to her like His Eye Is On the Sparrow. It had been Geo's favorite hymn and Regina could remember, back when he was in the children's choir, the way he would lift his voice and close his eyes at the refrain. “His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.” When this image also faded from the tea, no new scene replaced it. Regina sat there at the kitchen table, still staring into the cup, and she could feel her head clearing now, her mind coming uncluttered. As she came back to her sanity, as it moved through her with purpose, like a spirit coming through a dark house out into the day, she got up from the table and left the kitchen, walking through the foyer and up the stairs to her bedroom, and she could still hear Geo's voice, singing those words that, now, after everything, only mocked him. "I sing because I'm happy. I sing because I'm free."