Free The Warmest December by Bernice L. McFadden Page B

be real nice. A vacation next summer,” Delia said and reached for the nail polish again.
    Do you think he’ll be dead by then?
    I heard the voice inside me pipe up and I turned to see if Delia had heard it too. She hadn’t, she was focused on the second coat of red polish she was struggling to apply.
    Well, do you think he’ll be dead? the voice inside me was asking, pushing, demanding.
    Where will we get the money for a vacation? I thought to myself, trying to ignore the voice in my head.
    Well?
    Public Assistance didn’t give out enough money for plane trips and a new pair of open-toed sandals. Where would the money come from? I asked myself again, louder, way above the sound of the voice in my head.
    Will he be dead?
    The voice won out, its questions filling not just my mind, but every space in my body. “I don’t know!” I said aloud.
    “What?” Delia yelled from the living room. “What did you say, Kenzie?”
    “Nothing, Mom,” I said and bit my tongue. I felt the blood fill my mouth and I thought: Good, that’s what you get!
    The voice went silent.
    We sat together on the couch and watched sitcom after sitcom until finally ten o’clock rolled around and the news came on.
    “Oh, please,” Delia huffed at the newscaster. She rolled her eyes and reached for the remote.
    “It’s ten o’clock, Mom, it’s all that’s going to be on now,” I said and curled my arms around myself. “What’s wrong with the news?” I asked, already knowing she would ignore the question.
    Delia used to like the news. “You need a world view of things,” that’s what she used to say. The world view was the real view to Delia. But now things were different and she did not want to deal with any reality except her own, and her reality was right here on the couch in this shabby apartment, no more and no less.
    She preferred to lose herself in the afternoon soap operas, evening sitcoms, and late-night talk shows. We spoke to each other during commercials. Three minutes of empty chatter that touched on nothing important and never, ever stumbled onto talk of Hy-Lo. He did not exist to her. He’d been dead to her long before he lay dying in a hospital bed across town.
    “Summer in Florida, yeah, that would be real nice,” Delia said again and flipped the channel away from the news.
    Up until I was twelve, my summers were spent lazing beneath billowing white clouds that moved slowly over my grandmother’s house. This was Foch Boulevard, South Ozone Park, Queens, where laughter was a daily tonic and hugs and kisses were always in great abundance.
    Back then, that part of Queens was still rural. Only the main streets were black-topped. Foch Boulevard was a long, narrow dirt road where raccoons roamed in search of food during the early-morning hours. It was the North imitating the South, a slice of Augusta and a wisp of Richmond right in the middle of Queens.
    Large oak trees shaded Foch Boulevard; they towered above the neat one-family homes that lined the block. In the summer their branches hung heavy with glossy green leaves the size of two hands. We children would stand on our toes and pluck them free, lacing them together with needle and thread and draping them along the backyard fences as decorations for our imaginary dinner parties.
    Butterflies filled our days with all the colors of the rainbow while the night glowed alive with lightning bugs. We painted our lips with the juice from wild blackberries and gorged ourselves sick with the fat green grapes that hung heavy from the vines that wrapped and weaved their way along the brick walls of the backyards.
    People left their front doors unlocked and sat out on their small porches late into the summer night telling downhome stories, not caring if the next workday was just a few hours away. Summertime on Foch Boulevard came but once a year and you only got one round at life—you had to make the best of both.
    It was there among the salmon- and slate-colored stones that