The Summer We Got Free

by McKenzie, Mia

  Pastor Goode put a hand on George’s shoulder. “Brother, you are truly blessed to have so many beautiful girls in your life.”

  Mother Haley giggled. Giggled.

  Pastor Goode reached down and put his hand on both Sarah’s and Ava’s heads. “That means y’all little ones, too,” he said.

  Sarah thanked him disinterestedly.

  Ava, who always reacted to the pastor the way she did to Doris Liddy, from a feeling that she was not really liked by either of them, stared up at him and said nothing.

  “Say ‘thank you,’ Ava,” Regina told her.

  Instead, she said, “I don’t think people should be devoted to the church.”

  Mother Haley put a faux-lace-gloved hand over her mouth and looked ready to faint.

  George grimaced. “Ava, don’t—”

  “Wait a minute, now,” said Pastor Goode, putting up a hand to stop George interrupting. “Exactly why is it you think that, little Miss Ava?”

  Ava did not appreciate being called Little Miss. Little Misses were girls who sat with their hands in their laps and their ankles crossed so that the lacy edges on their Sunday socks scratched together. “Because people can’t fly if you always telling them they shouldn’t.”

  The pastor laughed. “You got quite a little imagination.”

  She knew he did not think people could fly. To accommodate his ignorance, she rephrased it in a way he could understand. “Nobody can think for theyself if you always telling them what to do.”

  The pastor’s lips pulled across his face in what Ava thought was supposed to be a smile, though there was no humor or joy in it. “People need guidance. They need to know how to walk in the light of God. The bible tells them how to do that and the church tries to keep them on that path.”

  Ava did not like the idea of anybody trying to keep her on a path. Her parents were always doing that, always telling her what she should or should not do, what was proper and what wasn’t. It made her feel like she couldn’t breathe sometimes. And she knew that if you couldn’t even breathe, you sure couldn’t fly. She decided right then that the purpose of church was to keep her on the ground.

  When they got home a little while later, George sent Sarah and Geo upstairs and sat Ava down in the kitchen. It was the only room downstairs without red walls and he always chose to lecture her there, a fact not lost on Ava.

  “I told you a hundred times if I told you once,” George said, standing with his palms flat against the kitchen table, with Mother Haley standing on one side of him and Regina sitting in a chair on the other side, “you aint supposed to question your elders.”

  “Why not?” It was the question she always asked and for which she had never yet gotten an answer that made any sense to her.

  “Because you supposed to respect them.”

  “Why can’t I do both?”

  George frowned. He hated arguing with this child. He knew he had to do it, that it was necessary, because she needed to learn the right way to behave, but she asked questions like an adult would ask, an adult who was smarter than he was, and that always threw him off. He had no answer for that question that would support his argument, so he ignored it. “It aint respectful to challenge the pastor in front of his congregation, Ava. Especially since you a child and you don’t even know what you talking about.”

  “I do know what I’m talking about,” she said.

  “Stop talking back to your father!” said Mother Haley.

  “Ava, go upstairs and change out of your church clothes,” Regina said.

  On her way out of the kitchen, Ava heard her grandmother saying, “Lord, I swear that child aint got no discipline. George wasn’t never allowed to talk back to his father like that. What y’all teaching that girl?”

  ***

  Summer came and went quickly that year, in a burst of haze and heat, and fall arrived earlier than expected, a thoroughly unwanted guest. Taking its lead, Mother Haley arrived for her second visit that year, right at the end of September, when the air was cool and crisp and smelled shockingly like distant snow.

  That was when George first stopped going home after work in the evenings. Instead, he went over to Blessed Chapel for the evening prayer service, led by Deacon Charles Ellis. Charles, who everybody called Chuck, was only a couple of years older than George, and had immediately befriended him when the Delaneys joined Blessed Chapel. Chuck was a quiet kind of man, slow-talking and easy-going compared to other men in the city, and George liked being around him. One evening, just a few days into his mother’s latest visit, George arrived early to the prayer service, and found the church freezing, and Chuck asked him if he knew anything about heating.

  “A little,” George said.

  They went down into the basement and George helped Chuck mess with the heater, adjusting knobs and banging here and there with a wrench until it clicked on.

  “You a life saver, George.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Trust me. Some of these older folks like to get pneumonia if it get below sixty-five.”

  For the rest of that week, George helped out in any way he could with the evening prayer services, adjusting the heater when it was too cold or warm in the sanctuary, bringing out cushions for the worshippers to kneel on, helping the older folks down onto their knees at the altar when it was time for the final prayer, and then up again when they were through. During the services, George watched Chuck closely as he read scripture and called souls to testify and delivered the prayers. He had such a gentle way about him, a kindness in his voice and demeanor that George felt brought to calm by.

  One evening, after service was over, George hung around while Chuck talked with a few people who needed further guidance and comfort. Then, when everyone else had left, they sat and talked awhile about how the service had gone.

  “People like listening to you,” George told Chuck. “I can tell. You a real good speaker. How come you don’t preach?”

  “The Lord aint called me to it, I guess,” Chuck said. “What about you? You got a good speaking voice. I bet you be great reading the scripture, or leading prayer.”

  “I don’t know about that,” George said.

  "Well, you just let me know if you want to give it a shot one of these evenings.”

  It was near eight o’clock by the time George got home and when he walked into the house, his mother said, “Where you been?”

  “Prayer.”

  “What you been praying for that got you smiling from ear to ear like that?”

  The grin on his face dropped away. He thought he saw Regina glance at him from her seat in front of the television.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I was just thinking about something funny, something Sister Kellogg said after the service.”

  “What she say?”

  “You won’t understand it if you wasn’t there.”

  As he moved to go up the stairs, Regina said, “Your dinner’s on top of the stove. Aint you hungry?”

  “No. I’ll take it for lunch tomorrow,” and he went on upstairs.

  Later, when Regina came up, he said, “It was something about the pews.”

  She paused in putting cream on her elbows and looked at him funny. “What you talking about?”

  “What Grace Kellogg said. It was something about how hard the pews is. She said they make them like that so when the preacher tell us we all going to hell, we can feel like our backsides is already there.”

  Regina laughed. “That Grace is a mess.”

  “Yeah, she is,” said George.

  When they climbed into bed, George put his hand on the back of Regina's head and kissed her mouth. Regina put her arms around his shoulders and held him to her. She kissed him again, pulling him down on top of her. George reached down under the covers, and grabbed the hem of her nightgown, and pulled it up over her head. He kissed her throat and shoulders and breasts, and, at first, Regina liked it, but after a while, when he had gone no further, hadn't even taken off his
drawers, she reached down and took hold of his penis, which was only half-erect, and stroked it with her palm and fingers, until, finally, he removed her hand and pushed himself inside her. Regina closed her eyes and tried to enjoy the physical pleasure, and to ignore the disappointment that was flooding through her, the same as it always did whenever her husband made love to her, the emotional disappointment that had been constant, almost since the beginning of their relationship.

  Long before they were married, George had been a friend of Regina's three older brothers, for years, since they were all children. He and Regina had never been close, but they had always been aware of each other, if vaguely. When George, at the age of twenty-two, had begun to court Regina, who was seventeen then, she had been surprised. He wasn't bad looking, and some of her girlfriends even thought he was sexy, but Regina had always thought of him as a skinny, distracted boy, always staring off into nothing, his bulgy eyes always squinted in consideration of some thought in his head, rather than any conversation going on around him. He was a surprisingly ardent suitor, though, and, once she had decided to give him a chance, she had found that she liked his sense of humor, which was cutting and sarcastic, and the way he liked to talk for hours about picture shows and music, rather than spending all their time together trying to get between her legs like most men did. In fact, George had proposed marriage before they had even slept together, and Regina had told him they would have to do that first, because she couldn’t imagine marrying a man she didn’t like in bed. After a sweaty, clumsy time out in a tobacco field, Regina decided to definitely not marry him. He was a bad lover, tentative and timid, at times unable to keep an erection. She was a pretty girl, who liked, and was liked by, other boys. She had had two lovers, and both of them had been better than George, and she didn't think she needed to settle.

  "Regina, that aint no good reason not to marry him," her friend Frances had told her. "If God meant that to be the test, he wouldn't have made it a sin to have sex outside marriage. You aint supposed to know nothing about that going into it."

  Regina had been brought up in the church and taught that sex before marriage was sinful. But she knew hardly anyone who didn't do it. And while she always joined in gossip about girls who gave it up to any boy who looked at them sideways, she thought doing it with somebody you were going with was perfectly reasonable. She looked it up in her bible and found nothing to support Frances’ claim. There were scriptures warning against adultery, incest, homosexuality, and bestiality, but normal sex outside marriage was never even mentioned as a sin. The question of whether or not to do it was already moot, though, and the question of whether or not to marry him became equally pointless when she realized she was pregnant.

  To her surprise and delight, George became a better lover after they had been together a little while. He was good at reading her and figuring out what she wanted. He learned the terrain of her body and could explore it with confidence. But the better he got at pleasing her physically, the more Regina felt him switching off emotionally. Whenever she had asked him about it, he'd said he didn't know what she was talking about, and sometimes he got angry, and over the years she had stopped asking. Their marriage was mostly good in every other way, so she had decided not to dwell on the one thing that didn't seem to work.

  Lying there beneath her husband now, she pushed from her mind images of things she did not want to see, and let pleasure carry her away from doubt.

  Near the end of that same week, Deacon Henry Ellis, Chuck Ellis’ father, died unexpectedly, and everybody from Blessed Chapel grieved along with their family. George watched through the front window as a seemingly endless stream of condolence-givers rang Chuck’s bell, all of them carrying covered dishes that no doubt contained cobblers and casseroles of all sorts. George wondered why death always called for food and guessed it was because it was the one way everyone knew to comfort each other, to say the things they couldn’t always think of words for. When his own father had died, years ago, when he was fifteen, their neighbors in Hayden had brought so many cakes and stews and pots of greens that he and his mother had eaten for weeks, once they had been able to eat. George remembered how his friend, Dale Jefferson, who had never cooked anything in his life, had tried to make candied sweet potatoes, and had brought them over to George one afternoon while his mother was resting. They were terrible, overcooked and flavorless, but sitting there at the tiny kitchen table, eating them with Dale, George had felt that everything Dale could not say to him—could not say because they were supposed to be men and there were things men could not say to each other—was spoken in the scent of the sweet potatoes, which, even if nothing else was right about the dish, was perfect. Standing at his front window now, George watched as Chuck came out onto his porch to greet Malcolm, Vic, and Gladys, who were all carrying casserole dishes.

  George left the window and went into the kitchen. He searched the cupboards, and the refrigerator, trying to think of something he could make. He and Regina were already planning to take over a yellow cake she had baked, but now George wanted to cook something himself. George knew how to cook. His mother, who had kept him close to her throughout his early boyhood, had taught him to cook and clean and sew. His father had argued with her constantly, saying that a boy ought to learn what a man needed to know, but his mother always got her way.

  George found a pastry crust that Regina had frozen and remembered that Chuck loved shepherd’s pie. He checked the clock. It was near three and Regina wouldn’t be home until after five. His mother had taken the children to the playground in the park down the street and he was sure they would be back within the hour. He didn’t want to be caught making a shepherd’s pie, didn’t want to have to answer his mother’s questions about why he was making it. He needed to cook something simpler, something faster. He found sweet potatoes in the bottom drawers of the refrigerator. He could candy them and take them over to Chuck before his mother returned.

  He filled a large pot with water, and set it on the stove to boil. He preheated the oven, then peeled the sweet potatoes, quartered them, and dropped them into the boiling water. Every little while, he checked the time. When the sweet potatoes were soft, he drained the water, then mashed them, put them into a large bowl, and added generous amounts of butter and sugar, stirring it all together with a large wooden spoon, adding cinnamon and nutmeg. He then poured the sweet potatoes into a baking dish and set them in the oven. The candied smell filled the room. Despite the chill outside, he opened all the windows and the back door, to let the warmth and the aroma waft away. Fifteen minutes later, when the sweet potatoes were nice and browned, he took them out of the oven and set them on top of the stove to cool, while he cleaned up all evidence of his effort, washing the dishes and wiping down the counter. It had only taken him forty-five minutes, but it wasn’t fast enough. He heard the front door open and the children bounding into the house, followed by his mother’s voice, saying, “Ooh, Lord, it’s chilly in here.” Cursing under his breath, he quickly put the top on the baking dish and set the sweet potatoes in the refrigerator, back behind the previous night’s leftovers, and closed all the kitchen windows, just as Geo ran into the kitchen, saying, “Daddy, we climbed all the way to the top of the monkey bars!”

  George waited for a chance to slip out with the candied sweet potatoes, but his mother gave him none. She sat in the kitchen all afternoon, smoking and listening to the radio. When Regina got home, she and Mother Haley heated up the last night’s leftovers, while George played cards with the children. When the aroma of candied yams rose again in the air, George hurried into the kitchen and found Regina placing the baking dish on the table, with the other heated-up food.

  “Regina, that’s—” He stopped. He knew that if he told her that he had made the dish for Chuck, she would think it was strange. He had never made anything to take over to any of their other grieving friends. Regina always cooked something, and she had already made the yellow cake to take over after dinner. It would seem odd to her
that he had gone out of his way to make another dish.

  “What?” Regina asked.

  “I made them sweet potatoes,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, surprised. “I figured your mother made them.”

  Mother Haley looked up from the greens she was seasoning. “I thought Regina made ‘em.”

  “No, I did,” George said.

  “Well, that was nice. I forgot those sweet potatoes was in there. I’m glad they didn’t go bad.” She stuck a serving spoon into the baking dish. Then she called for the children and they all sat down to eat. George watched as she scooped out some of the candied yams for each child, then a little for herself, before passing the dish to his mother, who took an extra large helping before passing the dish to George.

  George set it back down on the table. Watching his family eat the sweet potatoes, hearing their lips smack and the unusually loud squunch of their throats as they swallowed, seeing chicken and collard greens crowd against the sweet potatoes on their plates, so that they looked less golden brown, and their sweet, cinnamon aroma was drowned out by the smells of the other foods, George felt sad and very tired.

  After dinner, George and Regina went over to Chuck’s with the yellow cake Regina had baked. When George saw Chuck he thought he looked unglued, like a torn apart thing trying to hold itself together. Chuck took George upstairs, away from everyone.

  "He wasn't proud of me," Chuck said, sitting on the bed he shared with his wife.

  "What you mean? He was always bragging on you,” said George, leaning against the dresser.

  "He was? What he say?"

  "When you got the Buick, he went around church all the next Sunday telling everybody how good you was doing for your family."

  Chuck nodded. "Yeah." He was quiet for a long moment, then, "You think any man ever feel like he what his father want him to be?"

  "I don't know. Not this man."