The Summer We Got Free (3 page)

Ava folded the
skirt she had just ironed and laid it on the table with the other pressed
garments.

"Where you think he
go
all the time?" Sarah asked for the thousandth time.

Ava shrugged.
"Nowhere. He just don't want to be here, I guess."

"Well,
that's obvious, Ava," she said, rolling her eyes. "But he got to be
going
somewhere
'til after four in
the morning. You don't want to know?"

Their father
spent at least a couple of evenings a week away from home. Often, after dinner,
he would tell them he was going out for a while, and they wouldn't see him
again for hours. Sometimes Ava heard him returning at nearly dawn. It wasn't a
new thing. It had been his habit for a long time, years, though Ava could not
remember exactly when it had started. "I guess I'm just used to it,"
she said to her sister.

Sarah frowned.
"You the least curious person I know."

Ava didn’t think
she wasn’t curious. She just didn't have the appetite for other folks' business
that Sarah had.

"You used
to poke your nose into everything when we was kids," Sarah said.

Ava did not
think that was true.

When the doorbell rang, both sisters were startled by
the sound.

"Ignore
it," said
Ava,
sure it was one of their neighbors
trying to start some more trouble. "They'll go away
afterwhile
."

From the kitchen
behind them, they heard the back door open and shut with a thud.

"Shit," Sarah said. "Mama must’ve heard
the bell.” She hurried past Ava and the ironing board, disappearing into the
kitchen.

The doorbell rang again. Ava frowned and tried to just
keep on ignoring it, but when it rang a third time she put down the iron. When
she got to the front door, she peered through the glass pane and saw a woman
standing at the edge of the porch, her back turned, looking out at the street.
She could not see the woman's face, but nothing about the back of her reminded
Ava of any of their neighbors on the block. Cautiously, she pulled open the
front door and pushed open the screen door, just as the woman turned and came
forward, smiling, saying, "Good morning," and Ava, for no reason she
could name just then, reached out with both hands and took hold of the woman's
face, and kissed her.

When their lips touched, Ava tasted color. For many
seconds they stood there like that, one woman with her mouth pressed against
another woman's mouth, in the doorway, until, finally, the woman took a step
back from Ava, just as Sarah came through the kitchen door, following an excited-looking
Regina. When they got to the foyer, they saw Ava standing there with the strange
woman, both of them looking oddly satisfied.

Regina stared wide-eyed, not at the stranger, but at
her daughter. “Ava?” she asked, as if she weren’t sure. She got close to her,
peering into her face, searching, and after a moment she said, “Oh. I thought
that was you.”

“It is me, Mama,” Ava said.

“No, I mean the other you.
The first
you.
The one you used to be.”

Sarah eyed the woman at the door. “Who are you?”

“I’m looking for Paul Holly,” the woman said, sounding
a little flustered.

“Oh. You a friend of his?” Sarah asked.

“I’m Helena. His sister.”

She looked nothing like her brother, Ava thought. While
Paul’s face was round, hers was thin and
high-
cheekboned
. His brown eyes looked nothing like hers,
which were startlingly green. While he was slightly short for a man, she was
slightly tall for a woman, and had long fingers, while her brother’s were
stubby and meaty. He was handsome, but she was
strange-looking
,
and had very short, very kinky hair and glasses that looked bottle-thick. But
the greatest difference, and the most obvious one, was the severe difference in
their complexions. Paul was brown. But Helena was black.

Very black.

Black as forever, Ava would say of her, years later. Black
as always.

***

When
Helena crossed the threshold into the house, Ava felt the temperature rise. The
chill that had held in the corners since the previous night’s rain, that had
penetrated the wood floors and clung to the gray-red wallpaper like an
invisible frost, melted away in a moment. Ava felt it instantly, a sudden
warming on her skin, as if she had just left the shade and walked out into the
sun on a hot day. She looked at her mother and sister and she was sure they
felt it, too. Regina took off her sun hat and used it to fan herself. Sarah
unbuttoned her housecoat and pushed up its sleeves.

“I’m sorry to
drop by so unexpectedly,” Helena said. “I would have called, but I didn’t have
a phone number.” She set down the suitcase and black leather portfolio she was
carrying.

For a moment, they all stood there, hot and silent.
Then Sarah, who was grinning at Helena and almost bouncing on her heels, said, “Aint
this something? Paul's sister.”

Helena looked uneasy with all of them standing there
watching her, especially Regina, who was peering at her as though she was a
strange plant that had suddenly sprouted up in the middle of the foyer. “Well,”
Helena said, “I mean…is Paul here?”

“He’s sleeping,”
Ava said. “I’ll go get him up for you.” She moved towards the stairs.

“Sleeping?”

“Yes. He worked
all night.”

“Oh,” she said.
“Wait. Don’t.”

Ava stopped.

“I really shouldn’t
have come without calling. But I didn’t have a number.”

Regina squinted
at her. “You said that already.”

She frowned. “Did
I? Well, I just hate to wake him if he’s been up all night. To tell you the
truth, I think seeing me will be enough of a shock to his system without him
being half asleep on top of it.”

“Don’t wake him,
then,” Sarah said. “He’ll probably be up in a little while. Why don’t you come
in and wait?”

That idea made Ava feel suddenly lightheaded. She
leaned against the wall and tried to steady herself.

“I wouldn’t want to put y’all out,” Helena said.

“You wouldn’t be,” Sarah insisted. “Would she, Ava?”

Ava tried to say, “No, you wouldn’t be,” but her words
came out all jumbled.

Sarah frowned at her. “It’ll be nice to have company.
Won’t it, Mama?”

Regina was still peering at Helena, her eyes moving
over the woman’s face. “Black, aint you?”

Sarah put her hands over her face. “Oh, God, Mama.”

Helena gave Regina a strained smile and said, “Is
something burning?”

They all sniffed the air.

“It’s the iron,” Ava said, and she hurried out to the
dining room, glad to have an excuse to get away.

She found the iron face down on a pair of Paul’s work
pants. It had scorched through at the edges, melting a triangular black burn
into the material. She turned off the iron and stood there looking down at the
ruined slacks, the hard smell of singed polyester in her nose.

She did not understand what had happened in the doorway.
The feelings that had rushed through her the moment she saw Helena, feelings
she could not name and did not recognize, still lingered, and she found it hard
to breathe in the
suddenly-hot
house. She closed her
eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to get more air into her lungs. She could hear
Paul’s sister’s voice floating in from the foyer. She slipped out into the
kitchen, but the voice followed her, and after a moment Helena came into the
kitchen, with Sarah leading the way and Regina following half-interestedly
behind. Ava moved to the counter and wiped away some crumbs that weren’t there.

"This is my sister, Ava,” Sarah said. “Your
brother’s wife.”

There was a flash of surprise in Helena's eyes when Sarah
said the word
wife
, then she smiled,
the most tense, uncomfortable smile Ava had ever seen, and said, "It's good
to meet you,” holding out her hand for Ava to take.

Ava came forward and took Helena’s hand and tried to
say, “It’s good to meet you, too,” but the words came out all jumbled and wrong
again.

“What’s the matter with you?” Sarah asked her.

Ava didn’t answer. Instead, she offered Helena coffee,
very slowly, so the words came out right, and Helena said yes, she would like
some, and that she took it black. Helena sat down at the table and Sarah sat
beside her. Ava got a mug from the cupboard and filled it, and her hands shook
a little as she handed it to Helena.

"How long has it been since you saw your brother?"
Sarah asked. She was perched on the edge of her chair, her whole body angled
towards Paul’s sister.

"Eighteen
years."

"Paul told
us you got split up after your mother died. Sent to different relatives."

"Oh,” she said. “Well. We did get split up. I was
twelve. Paul was fifteen."

“Have you been in Philadelphia all this time?”

Ava had never known Sarah to be so friendly to anyone.
When she had first brought Paul around, five years ago, Sarah had looked him up
and down as if he were the most shiftless-looking Negro she had ever seen. It
had taken her months to warm up to him and it was at least a year before Ava
could say for sure that Sarah even liked him.

"I was here
until I was seventeen,” Helena was saying. “Then we moved to Baltimore. I’ve
been there ever since.”

"But you
back here now?"

She shook her
head. "I'm on my way up to New York. I just stopped by Philly so I could
see Paul."

"Well,
he’ll be up soon,”
Sarah
said again.

Ava looked at the clock. It was only ten-thirty. Paul
wouldn’t be up for hours. “Maybe I should wake him,” she said.

Sarah glared across the room at her. “You should let
the poor man sleep, Ava.” Then she smiled at Helena. “We
was
just about to start breakfast. We'd love to have you.”

Helena glanced
at Ava,
then
shook her head. "I really don't want
to put y’all out anymore than I already have."

"You haven’t,"
Sarah said. “You family. Aint she, Ava?”

“I guess so,”
Ava said.

Sarah beamed, making her sister’s strained smile look
all the more uneasy.

George had not heard the doorbell. Deep in sleep when
Helena came, he had been dreaming a familiar dream, an old dream, about an
abandoned factory by a train track, and he awoke feeling shaken and
disoriented. He could smell breakfast cooking and could hear the very faint
sizzle of cooking grease, and he remembered where he was, and that it was
Saturday morning, and he settled himself deeper into his mattress and put his
pillow over his head. He did this upon waking every Saturday morning, to block
out the sounds of Regina’s craziness coming down the hall, wafting under his
door like cigarette smoke and filling his space like a toxin. He could
remember, though it had been a long time ago now, that Saturday mornings in
this house had once been happy.
In their first years on this
block, when their family was unbroken.
George would always sleep in and
Regina would, too, when she didn’t have to work too early. They would give themselves
those two or three hours not to worry about Ava and what she might be up to.
Falling in and out of consciousness, they would whisper to each other, “You
think everything alright?” “Sure, I don’t smell
nothing
burning.” “We should get up and check on them, huh?” “Yeah, in a little while.”
These things sometimes said while cuddled close. Other times, as in summer,
when the room was hot as hell, said from as far apart on the mattress as they
could get. Often, the sound of screaming, or glass breaking, or even suspicious
quiet, would finally pull them reluctantly from their bed.

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."