Free The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie

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,