The Summer We Got Free (2 page)

Standing at the
top of the stairs, he felt a draft coming up that should not have been there.
The light switch at the top of the steps that controlled the lamp at the bottom
hadn’t worked for years, since before he’d even moved into his wife’s parents’
house. Peering down the staircase into the foyer, tilting his head to one side,
he tried to catch any sounds coming up from the dark rooms below, but the house
was quiet. He went slowly down the stairs, almost all of them creaking loudly
underfoot, the sound filling up the dense quiet. When he got to the bottom, he
flicked on the lamp, squinting against the small light that filled the foyer.
Nothing looked out of place.

When he stepped into the living room, the curtains at
the front window moved, and just at the same time he heard the front door open
in the foyer behind him. He quickly pressed himself against the wall.

“Who’s that?” he
called out, wishing he had put on his pants. “I got a gun,” he lied. “And I'm a
pretty good shot, too. My daddy taught me. He used to take me out to the woods
and let me shoot—” He stopped, frowned to himself, wondering why he was
telling his life story to somebody who was breaking into his house, and why on
earth he had called himself a
pretty good
shot.

Someone grabbed
his shoulder. He turned, ready to fight, and saw George Delaney, his
father-in-law, standing there.

“Jesus, Pop,” he
said.

“What you
doing?” the older man asked him.

“We heard a
crash,” Paul said. “I thought somebody was in here.”

George crossed
the living room and flicked on the overhead light. “The window’s broke. I could
see it from outside, coming up the steps.”

The curtains hanging at the front window billowed a
little in the small breeze that blew in. Paul went to the window and pulled
back one curtain, and saw that half the window was shattered. Large and small
pieces of glass covered one side of the worn, orange sofa that sat in front of
the window.

“
Goddamnit
,” Paul said. “Not
this again. I thought they was finished with all this.” He peered out into the
dark street. “You see any of them out there?”

“They
was
gone by the time I
walked up.”

There was a brick lying on the floor just by the coffee
table, and George picked it up. On one side, in dark-colored marker, was
written:
Do not make a treaty of
friendship with them as long as you live.

He frowned and handed it to his son-in-law, who took
it, read it, and shook his head.

“What the hell that supposed to mean?” Paul asked.

“It’s from the bible,” George said. “Deuteronomy.”

Sarah came down the stairs then. “What happened?” she
asked, pulling her robe tighter around her against the cool air coming in.

“Nothing,” George said.

Sarah went to the window and pulled back the curtain.
“It don’t look like
nothing
, Daddy,”
she said, eyeing the broken window and all the glass, and trying not to stare
at her brother-in-law in his drawers.

Paul held up the brick. “Somebody threw this.”

“Good Lord.”

“Not exactly,” he said, and the three of them looked
around at each other and laughed, all tired-sounding and with an
underhint
of something deeply sad, but still not nearly as
disturbed as the laugh that joined theirs then, a loud, crazed, unhinged kind
of laugh that made them all go quiet.

It came from the woman now standing halfway up the
stairs, peering over the banister at them, a tight grin drawn across her face,
a shock of gray-streaked hair sitting uncombed on top of her head, the
housecoat she wore buttoned wrong, so that she looked lopsided and disheveled.

Sarah hurried over to the stairs,
saying,
“Go on back to bed, Mama.”

Her
mother, Regina, continued down
the stairs. When she got to where Sarah was standing, she seemed to notice her
for the first time. “Move,
goddamnit
. How I’m
s'posed
to bust that preacher upside his head if you blocking
my way?”

“Pastor Goode aint down here,” Sarah said.

Regina peered over the banister at Paul and George in
the living room. “Well, y’all aint came down here at four in the morning for a
game of pinochle,” she said. She looked right at her husband then. “You coming
or going, George?” she asked him, because he was the only one fully dressed.

“Go back to bed, Regina,” George said.

She stared at him, not moving an inch, with an icy
glare that made the cool air coming in through the broken glass seem balmy.

“Fine,” he said. “Then I will.” He walked out of the
living room, back into the foyer, and went past Sarah on up the steps, and past
Regina, who put her hands on her hips and watched him go. He could feel her
eyes on his back as he reached the top of the stairs. He turned up the hallway
and opened a door, glad, as always, that they did not share a bedroom, and then
closed the door firmly behind him.

“I’ll sweep up this glass,” Sarah said, walking back
towards the kitchen.

“I’ll help,” said Paul, following her.

Without Pastor Goode's head to go upside, or George to
harass, Regina lost interest in the scene downstairs and went on back to bed.

George loved and hated the sound of his bedroom door
closing behind him. The catching of the latch sounded like privacy and exposure
at the same time. He liked knowing there was somewhere in the house he could go
without Regina being able to follow him. Even in her craziest moments, even on
her hardest Saturday mornings, she never dared come into his room, never dared
push him
that
far. It had been she
who, long
years
back, had kicked him out of the
bedroom they had shared. George had been angry about it then. And hurt by it,
though he would never admit to that and have Regina know for sure that she
could hurt him, which would surely make her try more often. When she’d kicked
him out of their bedroom, saying that she just wanted to be by herself for a
while, to try to deal in solitude with what had happened to their son, it had
represented a change in their marriage that was different from all the other
changes that had come over the years, something clear and final about the way
they would go on from that point, inhabiting their house and their lives. Any
love that had still lived then, any love that had still pulsed and breathed,
even shallowly, between them, had died that day, that too-hot, hazy day when
where George slept, and everything else in the whole world, had been altered
without his having a say. At least he liked to pretend he had not had a say. In
the years that followed, though, he had developed a ginger appreciation of his
solitary space, coming to know it as a refuge, a sanctuary when other
sanctuaries had fallen away, where he could shroud himself, ball himself up
into the tiniest thing. Still, whenever he closed the door behind himself,
whenever he blocked out Regina and the world, he had the feeling that something
was being revealed, too, and that was this: that George Delaney needed to hide.
That he needed to become some tiny thing.
That there was
something to be shrouded from.
And something to be
tiny about.

He heard Regina
walk past his door just a handful of seconds after he closed it, her
slippered
footsteps slowing right outside the door, and he
imagined her straining to hear what he might be doing, what he might be
thinking, tucked inside his privacy. He felt a sputter of hatred for
her—not a surge, just a sputter—as he heard her open the door to
her own bedroom.

George got
undressed, shedding himself of the clothes he’d worn to work the previous
morning, the slate grey slacks that were standard for city workers in the
streets department.

Standing at his bedroom window, he thought about the
vagrant at the trashcan and wondered why he'd gotten so out of sorts about some
old bum in a brown coat. He spent so much of his mental energy trying not to
think about his father, and even more of it trying not to think about his son,
yet, on an ordinary morning, under a same-as-always sky, they had suddenly
careened into his psyche from either side and smashed head-on into each other
in his mind. He still felt rattled. He took a drag off his cigarette, the thick
smoke stinging his eyes, and peered down into the quiet street below, wondering
which of their neighbors had thrown the brick. It may have been Pastor Goode,
but he had rarely ever done things like that himself. Skulking around in the
dark and chucking bricks through windows was the sort of thing the preacher had
usually inspired others to do. As he watched the street below, George saw a
figure appear, coming from the corner at Fifty-Eighth and walking down the
middle of the street. In the dark, he couldn’t see who it was. The figure slowed
its pace and looked right at the Delaney house. George frowned, and reached for
his pants, in case he had to confront the brick-thrower. But the figure quickened
its pace again and walked on down the street, rounding the corner at Fifty-Ninth
and disappearing from George’s sight.

Sarah cleaned up the broken glass, Paul moving the
sofa so she could sweep behind it. When it was all swept up, he got a piece of
cardboard from a box at the top of the basement stairs and taped it into the
broken pane. “That’ll do for now, I guess.”

Sarah stared at the cardboard, a hard look of frustration
on her face. She was two years older than Ava, and although there was a sibling
resemblance, Sarah was thin and stick-like where Ava was thicker and curvier.
She had a hard edge to her personality, too, Paul
thought, that
Ava did not have.

"I hate them," she said. "Everybody on
this block. I hate every last one of them."

"They aint done nothing like this in two years,"
Paul said. "No letters. No calls. No sermons in the street."

Sarah just stared at the cardboard, looking angry and
sad, and Paul patted her shoulder.

When he climbed back into bed, he snuggled up close to
Ava. She, indifferent to all the commotion that had gone on, was deep in a
restful sleep.

Ava awoke again at just after nine in the morning, brought
out of sleep by the sound of her mother’s haunted mumbling coming down the
hall. Regina, who was always
Crazy
on Saturday
mornings, could be heard from her bedroom at the front of the house, all the
way to Ava and Paul’s room at the back. Glancing at Paul, who was snoring
softly beside her, she got up, pulled on jeans and a blouse with ruffled
sleeves, and tiptoed out of the room and down the stairs, being careful not to
draw her mother’s attention. She went to the living room and pulled back the
front curtains to let in some sunlight. The cardboard taped into the window
caused her to pause only a moment before she turned and walked through the
dining room into the kitchen. Once there, she opened more curtains, the
rain-cleansed sunlight splashing itself onto the dull red wallpaper. She made
coffee,
then
went into the dining room, where she got
out the ironing board and iron, and set them up by the dining room table. The
basket of clean laundry she had left on the table the day before was still
there, and she pulled out one of Paul's work shirts and began to press it.

When her sister,
Sarah, came downstairs, she walked right by Ava without a word, on into the
kitchen. After a while, she came back into the dining room with a cup of coffee
and sat down at the table. "Pastor Goode’s up to it again."

Ava folded a
just-ironed skirt and asked what had happened that morning, and when Sarah told
her about the brick through the window, she said, "So, that's what that
noise was."

Sarah sipped her
coffee and looked thoughtful. "Just when Mama was thinking about moving.”

Ava slipped a
skirt over the top of the ironing board. "If Mama was ever willing to
move, we'd have been gone years ago.”

Sarah shook her
head, "Only ‘cause they tried to force us out. Scare us out. She didn’t
want to give Pastor Goode the satisfaction. But when they stopped, she started
thinking about going. I saw her reading the paper one day, a while back, and
she had circled some things in the real estate section. She don’t want to be
here no more than they want us here.”

Ava knew that
Sarah was wrong, that Paul had been the one circling things in the real estate
section. Sarah wasn't a person you could disagree with casually, though. She
took any contrary opinion, no matter how reasonable, or gently expressed, as a
personal attack. So, Ava just kept on ironing and said nothing more.

A little while
later, their mother came down the stairs, still looking disheveled, with a sweater
on over her nightclothes and a large sunhat on her head.

"You gone
do some gardening, Mama?" Sarah asked her.

"I think my
tomatoes is ready," Regina said, heading for the back door.

There were no
tomatoes. There wasn't even a garden. But Regina disappeared through the back
door looking determined.

"Daddy was
out all night again," Sarah told Ava.