The Summer We Got Free (6 page)

“That’s all the
better,” Helena assured her.

Paul, who had
never imagined that Sarah had loved any man, leaned forward a little on the
step.

Sarah hesitated.
She had never told anyone about the man before. “This was years ago,” she said.
“Back in sixty-nine. When I used to work way down in Old City, at the bank on
Chestnut. At
lunch time
, in the summer, I used to walk
down to Penn’s Landing. There was a man I always walked by.
A
street performer.
A fire-eater.
People was
always gathered around him, watching him do his tricks. At first, I never
stopped. I thought it was stupid, I thought he should go get a real job. But
every time I walked by, I’d see the fire out the corner of my eye and wonder
how he did it.”

Helena was
holding her iced tea, but she wasn’t drinking it, and she looked mesmerized by
Sarah’s story.

“One day, after
I had walked by him, I was sitting on a bench eating my lunch and it started to
rain, so I ran and stood under this awning. It wasn’t raining hard, but I
didn’t have
no
umbrella, and I didn’t want my hair to
get wet and have to go back to work looking like a drowned rat. From where I
was standing, I could see him doing his fire thing. He wasn’t but twenty feet
away. The crowd had left soon as it started raining, so it was just
him
there by
hisself
and he kept
performing. I watched him. The way he held the fire, the way he was so gentle
with it, you’d have thought it was alive, and fragile. He sort of caressed it.
He looked at it with a kind of love in his eyes. I watched him juggle his
batons, and not one of them went out in the rain. Then he opened his mouth wide
and ate the fire from every one of them. It was so wonderful that I started
clapping. He turned around and saw me there and he smiled. And, Lord, was he
handsome. Scruffy-looking, like an alley cat, but he had a sweet face. He bowed
a few times and I knew he wanted me to give him some money, so I threw a few
coins in his hat. After that I would stop all the time and watch him do his
fire tricks, and I’d stand at the back of the crowd.”

“Did you ever
talk to him?” Paul asked.

“No. That one
time, I’m sure he was just glad to have somebody to perform for and be able to
make a little bit of money in the rain. But he never paid me no mind when there
was a whole crowd of people throwing money in his hat.”

“Seem like you
would have tried to talk to him, if you liked him so much,” Paul said. He had
always thought Sarah was a pretty woman, if a little skinny, and he knew for
sure that men were interested in her, because sometimes when his buddies from
work saw her they’d ask Paul if she was going with anybody. Whenever they’d
smile at her and try to start a conversation, though, she would act cold and
unfriendly. She never believed Paul when he told her they were interested in
her, no matter how much he assured her that they were.

Sarah shrugged.
“It wasn’t
nothing but a silly little crush.
I left
that job a year later and I aint really thought about him since,” she said,
which wasn’t true.

“We had a cousin
who juggled,” Helena said. “Remember, Paul?”

He nodded. “Just
oranges, though, and they
wasn’t
on fire.”

When, a few
minutes later, Paul went inside to use the bathroom, he found Ava in their
bedroom, sweeping under their bed, and he accused her of avoiding his sister.
“I’m not avoiding anybody,” she told him.

“You the one
asked her to stay,” Paul said.

“I know.”

“Then what’s wrong? Why you acting all—” he
started to say
nervous
, but it wasn’t
a word he had ever used to describe Ava before, ever, and it felt strange even
to think it. Nervousness required a level of worry, of concern about
things, that
Ava just didn’t have. “Strange,” he said,
finally.

“I’m not acting
strange,” she insisted, and continued to sweep under the bed.

Paul sighed.
Maybe it was
him
. Maybe the surprise of Helena’s appearance
and the fact that he had barely slept in twenty-four hours was making him see
things that weren’t there. He felt suddenly overwhelmed with tired and he sat
down on the bed. For a few moments, he watched Ava sweeping, watched the ends
of the straw broom as it scratched against the worn wood floor. “Ava, I lied to
you about something,” he said, without knowing he was going to say it.

“About what?”

He continued to
watch the broom ends, noticing the way they caught in the cracks that had split
into the wood after so many years of nobody taking care of the floors.

“When me and my sister got separated, I didn’t go live
with my cousin like I told you. I went to jail.”

She didn’t even
look up from her sweeping. “Jail?”

He nodded.
“Well,
juvie
.”

“Why? What for?”

He sighed a long
sigh and shook his head. “Baby, I aint ready to tell you all that yet.” He knew
she would not press him, though some little part of him wanted her to. He
rubbed his eyes with his fists, like a child.

“You need to rest,”
she said.

He nodded, lay
back on the bed, and was asleep.

When Ava got to the back screen door, she saw Helena
alone out on the back porch, sitting on the top step, smoking, her head leaned
back against the wooden porch railing, staring out at the overgrown yard. Paul
was wrong. She hadn’t been avoiding his sister. She had been trying to think of
a way to talk to her, to broach the subject of what had happened at the door
that morning. Now she stepped out onto the porch. “Where’s Sarah?” she asked
Helena.

“Your mother needed something, so she went inside to
help her,” Helena said. “Where’s Paul?”

“’Sleep.”

“Oh,” she said.
“Good. I thought he was going to pass out on the steps here a little while ago.
Does he work nights a lot?”

“A lot lately.
He wants us to get our own house,” Ava said.

“
He
wants?” she asked. “You don’t want
that?”

Ava shook her
head.

Helena took a
drag off her cigarette. Smoke filled the air between them and then blew away on
a warm breeze.

“I’m sorry about
what happened this morning,” Ava said. “At the door. I haven’t really been
feeling like myself today.”

Helena grinned.
“
Who
have you been feeling like? Someone who kisses
strangers who show up at their door?” She shrugged. “Well, stranger things have
happened.”

“Stranger things
have happened to you than showing up on the doorstep of the brother you haven’t
seen in twenty years and being kissed on the mouth by a woman you’ve never seen
before who turns out to be his wife? Baltimore must be a lot more interesting
than it sounds.”

Helena laughed, but Ava didn’t really see the humor in
any of it. Helena seemed to realize that and said, “I’m sorry, Ava. I’m not
making fun of you. You’ve just looked very serious and concerned since it
happened and I’m trying to lighten the mood a little. It was odd. But I’m sure
there’s a simple reason for it.”

Ava had not
considered there was a simple reason. Thinking about it now, she could not come
up with one, either. “Like what?”

“Maybe you saw
Paul in me and were drawn to that. And you…reached out…in a way that seemed
strange afterwards, but was just a natural impulse at the time. An embracing of
the qualities of my brother
that are
in me.”

Ava did not
think that answer was at all simple. Or at all true, for that matter. She was
sure she had not seen Paul. Paul had never inspired that kind of behavior in
her. She thought about saying that, but changed her mind. She wanted to know,
wanted to really understand, what had happened, and why, but she did not want
to push. Especially since Helena seemed so unconcerned about it. They may as
well have been talking about the weather, with the way she sat there, smoking
her cigarette and casually flicking the cinders into the ashtray at her feet.

“Anyway, it was
just one moment, and it passed, so you don’t need to feel embarrassed about it,
or nervous.”

But then Ava saw something. Still with that amused
look on her face, Helena leaned down to tap her cigarette ash into the ashtray.
And her hand shook. No, not shook.
Trembled
.
She looked up at Ava and for a moment her façade of unconcern failed and Ava saw
a flash of worry in her eyes.

“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.