Free The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie Page B

faltered and Regina saw a flash of
anger in his eyes.
    “Ava, what’s wrong with you?” George asked. “You know
better than that.”
    Pastor Goode chuckled. “Oh, it’s alright. She’s
probably just tired after the long service. It’s my fault for droning on so
long.”
    Regina and George laughed with him, assuring him that
the sermon had been wonderful, the best sermon they’d heard in years.
    “Well, I’m glad y’all are here to receive it,” he
said. He reached out and patted the top of Ava’s head and grinned cheerfully at
her.
    Many years later, though, Regina would think back on
that one moment, and the flash of anger in the eyes of that preacher, and she
would wish she taken her children and walked out of there right then, and never
joined that church.

 
    1976

 
 
    A va had trouble
keeping her eyes off Helena. Sitting at the dinner table, listening to her
husband’s sister talking about some of the places she had been and some of the
things she had seen in the last many years, Ava found herself staring and
wondering what it was about this person, this woman who seemed unextraordinary except for the extreme blackness of her
skin, that had made her behave the way she had at the door that morning. She
could not understand it. Helena seemed smart and friendly and funny, joking
with Sarah and Regina and reminiscing with Paul, but there was nothing about
her that struck Ava as particularly special. And though Ava did not think of
herself as someone who noticed specialness in people, she thought there should
be something about Helena that stood out to her, something that explained it.
But there wasn’t. She began to feel that she had imagined it all. As if what
had happened at the door that morning had been a strange hiccup of emotions,
coincidental to Helena’s arrival and completely unrelated to it. She considered
that for several minutes, and then Helena turned, in the middle of a story
about her third grade class back in Baltimore, and looked right at Ava, right
into her eyes, and Ava felt an urge to reach out and touch her that was so
extreme she had to push herself back farther in her chair and grip the sides to
stop herself from getting up and doing just that. Helena did not appear to
notice and continued with her story, looking away from Ava, at Sarah and Paul
and Regina and George, and in a few moments the feeling passed.
    Just as they were finishing dinner, the sky opened up,
and rain like a torrent drummed hard against the open windows of the kitchen.
Paul and George rushed to close them, while Ava and Sarah cleared the table.
Ava saw, through the window, a heavy flash of lightning across the sky, and
then thunder shook the house.
    “Somebody better close the upstairs windows,” Regina
said. “’Fore it’s water all over the floors.”
    “We’ll get ‘ em ,” George
said, and he and Paul hurried out of the kitchen.
    Ava watched Helena carry a stack of plates to the
sink.
    “You don’t have to do that,” she said.
    “I’m glad to.” Helena took the glasses Ava was holding
and placed them in the sink with the plates. “It’s really coming down,” she
said, watching the rain through the window, as lightning cut hard again across
the sky.
    The lights in the house flickered and went out.
    “Shit,” Sarah said.
    There was some lingering daylight, but not enough to
see by inside.
      “You got
your matches, Mama?” Ava asked the outline of Regina that she could make out in
the half-dark.
    Regina took from her pocket the book of matches she
was always carrying for cigarettes and struck one. In the light of the small
flame, Ava watched her move to the counter and open a drawer, taking out two candles.
She handed them both to Sarah, who held them while Regina lit them. Regina then
took one of the lit candles for herself. “It’s a few more of these in the
dining room,” she said, and she and Sarah went to get them, leaving Ava and
Helena in the kitchen, in the dark.
    At