The Summer We Got Free

by McKenzie, Mia

  “Now, speaking of my brother,” Helena said, “why don’t you come sit down here and talk to me about him.” She patted the weather-worn step beside her. “Would you?”

  Ava did not want to talk about Paul. Still, she came and sat down on the step.

  Helena picked up the pack of cigarettes that was by her feet and offered her one.

  Ava shook her head. “I don’t smoke.”

  She looked surprised. “Paul smokes like a chimney. You don’t mind it? I think I’d hate to be with somebody who smoked if I didn’t.”

  “My parents smoke,” Ava said. “My sister. I’m used to it.”

  “But you never picked it up?”

  “I don’t get addicted to things.”

  “Ever?”

  Ava shook her head, no.

  Helena took another long drag off her cigarette. “Then, you’re lucky.”

  There was the ring of an ice cream truck bell in the distance and it almost reminded Ava of something, only the memory, whatever it was, was distant and faint as the bell and she couldn’t settle on it.

  “How did you meet Paul?” Helena asked her.

  “At the museum. He used to work there, too.”

  She nodded. “That’s right. You said that. Did he find you standing under a Caravaggio, or something very romantic like that?”

  “He found me in the cafeteria, serving macaroni and cheese.”

  “And how’d you know he was the one?”

  “The one?” Ava asked. “I didn’t.”

  Helena laughed. “I’m being silly, I guess. I haven’t seen my brother in a long time. I just want to know that he’s found love and that it’s all soft and romantic, and that he’s happy and taken care of.”

  “I don’t know how soft and romantic it is,” Ava said, “but we take care of each other.”

  “No children, though? Do you mind if I ask why?”

  “I don’t mind. I can’t have children. I stopped bleeding a long time ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” Helena said.

  It had happened when she was twenty, suddenly and for no reason her doctor could discern. It had never been a source of great upset for her, because she had never thought much about having children and she told Helena that. “I don’t think about children anyway.”

  “What about Paul?”

  Ava’s first thought was that Paul was fine about it. When she had told him, back before they were married, he had said it didn’t matter that much to him and she had taken his word for it. But sitting there now, thinking about it, she felt unsure. “Now that I think about it, sometimes he seems disappointed.”

  “Now that you think about it? You never thought about it before now?”

  It was an absurd question. Of course she had thought about it before. When she tried to recall when she had thought about it, though, or just what she had thought, she could not. And the fact that she could not remember ever once having considered her husband’s feelings about having children, or not having them, made her feel uneasy, and ashamed, which were two more things she couldn’t remember ever feeling before, even though she knew she must have.

  Helena was watching her, curiously, her head tilted slightly to one side the way Paul’s did when he was trying to figure something out.

  “Of course I’ve thought about it,” Ava lied.

  Sarah came out of the house then, smiling and looking eager, holding an ice cream cone in each hand. When she saw Ava, her smile melted a little around the edges like the ice cream did around the sides.

  “I didn’t know you was finished cleaning, Ava,” she said. “I only got two.”

  Ava didn’t care and she said as much.

  Sarah handed Helena one of the cones, and as Ava watched them both licking the cool treats, she remembered sitting with her siblings on the front steps, eating ice cream, which had been her favorite thing, a thing she had craved and begged her mother for every time the ice cream truck came around. She remembered how she had loved the sweetness, had held each bite in her mouth until it melted into nothing on her tongue. She remembered how she had savored each and every lick.

  “It’s a nice day out,” Sarah was saying.

  Ava noticed she sounded happy, which was unusual. Unusual for Sarah to sound happy and unusual for Ava to notice.

  “I don’t know why it’s so hot inside the house,” Sarah continued.

  “Don’t you like ice cream?” Helena asked Ava.

  Ava shook her head. “No,” she said, and she recognized the strangeness of her words as she said them. “It doesn’t really taste like anything to me.”

  Regina had gone to the kitchen to take out the frozen meat for that night’s dinner, to let it thaw, and she saw through the window her daughters sitting out on the porch with Paul’s sister. As she watched them, George came in and stood beside her at the sink. “You back?” he asked.

  “I’m back.”

  He peered out the window. “She still here? I thought she had a train to catch.”

  “She’s staying a little while. To catch up with her brother.”

  George frowned.

  “I’m glad,” Regina said. “Look how happy Sarah looks. And Ava. I aint seen Ava so interested in anybody or anything in seventeen years.”

  George shrugged. “I don’t know what they think is so interesting about her. I don’t like her. She rubs me the wrong way.”

  Regina waved a dismissive hand at him. “She a nice girl.”

  “How you know what kind of girl she is? We don’t know her. Her own brother don’t even know her. He aint seen her in twenty years. Who knows what she came here for?”

  She rolled her eyes. “What you think she came here for, George? To swindle us out of our family fortune?”

  “Why you always got to have a sarcastic answer for everything?”

  “Because you looking for a reason not to like her.”

  “Why would I?”

  “Because she here. Because she seem to want to know us, and deep down you think it’s something wrong with anybody who want to be around us, who don’t treat us like Pastor Goode and the rest of ‘em. You was the same way with Paul when he first started coming around.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” George said, and he believed it was. He didn’t like the woman because of her questions. Watching through the window now, as she talked to Ava and Sarah, he saw that same searching in her eyes as she had when she looked at all of them. He wondered what it was she was searching for and, no matter what Regina said, he felt sure she wasn’t there just to catch up with her brother. “How long is a few days?” he asked.

  Regina shrugged.

  George sighed and shook his head, just as Helena’s eyes met his through the window.

  1950

  Blessed Chapel Church of God stood near the corner of Fifty-Ninth and Radnor, right at the end of the block, and both Regina and George felt good about living on a street with a church. It was another reason they had chosen the house. They were both still a little uneasy about living in the city. The block they had just moved from, and the neighborhood that surrounded it, over in southwest Philadelphia, had been plagued with crime. In the five years they had been there, there had been a murder only a few blocks away from their house, and several muggings, two of them at their own corner. And while they both believed that the good Lord watched over them no matter where they were or what they were doing—or, at least, while Regina believed that; George felt there were some places the Lord would not go, some things the Lord would not watch—they both felt that having a church right on the corner made the street safer. The very first Sunday after they moved onto Radnor Street, they went to join Blessed Chapel.

  It was a large church, twice the size of the church they had attended for the last five years and four or five times the size of the church they had grown up in, down in Hayden. It was made of stone and mortar and stood two stories high. It had a huge, cool, sunken basement with several rooms, including two changing rooms for choir members, two
classrooms, a kitchen where meals were cooked and sold on Sundays and holidays, and a chapel and altar, behind which there was a baptismal pool. On the upper floor, there was a large, main chapel, where Sunday service took place. It had thirty pews and two choir boxes. The carpeting in the sanctuary was dark red and lush. There was a large pulpit, with an organ and a piano. All the windows around the main chapel were stained-glass and each depicted a scene from the New Testament: the baby Jesus in a manger, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension. Behind the pulpit, there was a small room where the pastor could wait before going out to deliver his sermons.

  “It’s good to meet a nice, church going young couple,” Pastor Ollie Goode told Regina and George, sitting in the little room behind the pulpit. They could hear the voices of children rising up from the basement where the youngest Sunday School students were taught, singing Jesus Loves Me, This I Know. “What church did y’all go to down in Hayden?”

  “Deliverance,” George said. “You probably aint heard of it.”

  “Reverend Michaels’ church?”

  “That’s right,” George said, looking at Regina, who also looked surprised.

  The pastor sat back in his chair and smiled at them. He was a handsome man, around forty, balding and virile-looking, with penny-colored skin and

  hazel eyes, and dimples in his cheeks that appeared when he smiled, which he did often. “Maddy Duggard says y’all got three little ones.”

  Regina nodded. “We got a six year-old and four year-old twins. They down at Sunday School."

  “That’s wonderful. I got one of my own.” He pointed to a framed photograph of a boy around the twins' ages, grinning at the camera. “They sure are a gift from the Lord,” he said. “Even when they running you ragged, which is most of the time.” He had a deep, soft laugh that reached up into his eyes.

  George asked about the size of the congregation at Blessed Chapel, and Pastor Goode said they were over three-hundred now.

  “You a young pastor for a church this size,” George said.

  “I was a junior minister until my father passed last year. It was sudden and I think the congregation wanted somebody in the pulpit that reminded them of him. Truth be told, I almost said no. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to fill his shoes. But Linda—that’s my wife; you’ll meet her—she reminded me that when the Lord calls, whenever and wherever he calls, we must answer.”

  Service that first Sunday was magnificent. Later, years later, Regina remembered thinking of it just that way. Magnificent. The congregation was full and friendly and people stopped on the way to their seats to greet the Delaneys, to welcome them to the church and to the block. They were a sundry group, from the elders who had been leaders of the church since it had been built in the 1920s, and who now claimed the front rows of pews, their shoulders straight and dignified in their Sunday bests, the women in their black or brown or, more often, stone-gray wigs, and the men, whose canes often matched the colors of their dark suits, to their grandchildren, who made up the young adult choral, and who, no matter how much they were fussed at about it, always slouched in the pews, their legs stretching out into the aisles, their attention focused more on each other than anything else. The bulk of the congregation, though, was the generation that linked them, men and women who were Regina’s and George’s ages, with small children. These were the Liddys, Doris and Dexter, who lived next door to the Delaneys, with their two children, Sondra and Evan, and who spent all their free time involved with the church; the Browns, Sam and Alice, who lived across the street with their teenage daughters, Antoinette and Lonette, and who were both ushers at Sunday service; the Ellises, Charles and Lena, he a deacon and she a deacon’s wife, and their son and daughter, David and Marlene; the Mitchells, Hattie and Ernest, and their children, Louise, Mary, and Carl, also next-door-neighbors of the Delaneys, and Sunday school teachers every single one; Jane Lucas, a young widow with a small son, Rudy, who lived a few doors up from the Delaneys and was a teacher at the elementary school a few blocks away; and Maddy Duggard, whose husband had taken off and left her with two children, Jack and Ellen, and whose mother, Henrietta, was helping her to raise them; and besides them a dozen more, most of whom—though the Delaneys did not know it—had been peering through their windows as they had unloaded their belongings the previous day. Most of them still did not understand what it was that had made them hesitate for just over half an hour that first morning. Doris was among the few who could name it, who could attribute it to the lack of fear she saw in the four-year-old Ava, but even she could not say exactly why it made her so uneasy. Whatever the reason was, once the ice was broken with the new family, once Maddy and Malcolm and Doris had all gone over, most everyone else on the block made their way over, too, their hesitation giving way to the happy, warmed-up feelings most of them got from watching the little girl. Vic Jones, who was Malcolm’s half-brother, had been the next to stop by, and he had been followed by Grace and Eddie Kellogg. By that first night, the Mitchells, Jane Lucas, Maddy’s mother, Henrietta, and a dozen more had come. Once they were with the Delaneys, drinking coffee in their kitchen, tasting the cobbler Regina had thrown together, or sharing something they had baked and brought over as a welcome, most had quickly forgotten their strange hesitation. Up close, the good feelings Ava inspired had been doubled, tripled in some cases. Grace Kellogg found that the little girl’s laugh somehow reminded her of the pajamas she had worn as a child—thick, feet-in pajamas that had kept her warm in the drafty house her family had lived in for many years. Looking into Ava’s eyes, Jane Lucas remembered the smile of her love, her young husband, who had died in the war. When Ava tripped and fell over the edge of the rug while running by at full speed, Chuck Ellis lifted her up and in that moment he was sure he smelled morning, though it was six in the evening at the time. These were the people who made up the congregation of Blessed Chapel and who went out of their way that first Sunday to make the Delaneys welcome, rearranging themselves on the fifth pew from the front to offer the family good seats, close to the pulpit and the choir box, the latter of which was filled that morning with members of the Women’s Choir.

  They opened the service with song, a slow song that got everybody settled, and then an elderly deacon led them all in prayer, before, finally, Pastor Goode appeared and began the sermon. He spoke about friendship, about home and community, and the soft light through the stain-glassed windows fell against his dark robe so that it glowed like embers. When the choir sang again, the song was bigger, and livelier, and everyone got up out of their seats and sang along, clapping their hands and stomping their feet, shaking their tambourines. The floor shook beneath them. Their voices soared.

  When the service was over, Regina and George took their children up to meet the pastor. They waited at the back of a small crowd of folks offering their compliments on the sermon, or asking the pastor for his prayers, either for themselves or someone they knew who was going through hard times. When Hattie Mitchell asked him to pray for her mother, who had fallen ill the week before, Pastor good took Hattie’s hand. “I been praying for her ever since I heard,” he said. “And me and Linda gone stop by your house tomorrow evening so we can all pray together. Until then, know that the Lord is with you, and no matter how bad things seem, he will always make a way.”

  When the Delaneys got to the front of the crowd, Regina introduced the children. Pastor Goode shook Sarah’s hand, and Geo’s, but Regina saw him hesitate, just a fraction of a moment, before reaching out for Ava’s. When he finally did, he did so smiling, but Ava, either because she had sensed his hesitation, or for some other reason altogether, did not take the pastor’s hand when it was offered. Instead, she folded her arms across her chest. The pastor’s smile faltered and Regina saw a flash of anger in his eyes.

  “Ava, what’s wrong with you?” George asked. “You know better than that.”

  Pastor Goode chuckled. “Oh, it’s alright. She’s probably just tired after the long service. It’
s my fault for droning on so long.”

  Regina and George laughed with him, assuring him that the sermon had been wonderful, the best sermon they’d heard in years.

  “Well, I’m glad y’all are here to receive it,” he said. He reached out and patted the top of Ava’s head and grinned cheerfully at her.

  Many years later, though, Regina would think back on that one moment, and the flash of anger in the eyes of that preacher, and she would wish she taken her children and walked out of there right then, and never joined that church.

  1976

  Ava had trouble keeping her eyes off Helena. Sitting at the dinner table, listening to her husband’s sister talking about some of the places she had been and some of the things she had seen in the last many years, Ava found herself staring and wondering what it was about this person, this woman who seemed unextraordinary except for the extreme blackness of her skin, that had made her behave the way she had at the door that morning. She could not understand it. Helena seemed smart and friendly and funny, joking with Sarah and Regina and reminiscing with Paul, but there was nothing about her that struck Ava as particularly special. And though Ava did not think of herself as someone who noticed specialness in people, she thought there should be something about Helena that stood out to her, something that explained it. But there wasn’t. She began to feel that she had imagined it all. As if what had happened at the door that morning had been a strange hiccup of emotions, coincidental to Helena’s arrival and completely unrelated to it. She considered that for several minutes, and then Helena turned, in the middle of a story about her third grade class back in Baltimore, and looked right at Ava, right into her eyes, and Ava felt an urge to reach out and touch her that was so extreme she had to push herself back farther in her chair and grip the sides to stop herself from getting up and doing just that. Helena did not appear to notice and continued with her story, looking away from Ava, at Sarah and Paul and Regina and George, and in a few moments the feeling passed.