The Summer We Got Free

The Summer We Got Free

First
published 2012

by
BGD Press

Oakland, CA

Copyright © 2012 by Mia McKenzie

All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 0988628600

ISBN-13:
978-0-9886286-0-1

Library of
Congress Control Number: 2012917177

All rights reserved. No part
of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by
electronic, mechanical, or any other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information stor
age
or retrieval system, without expressed written
permission from the author.

The Summer
We Got Free

Mia McKenzie

for
Franny
,
Nana and Pop-Pop

and
all the people, living
and dead, who helped me get free

1976

A
va did not remember the taste of butter. It had been
seventeen years since she had last moaned at the melt of hot-buttered cornbread
on her tongue. She was not bothered in the least about it, because she did not
know that she did not remember. At breakfast, when she dropped a square of butter
on grits, or on yams at dinner, and laid a spoonful of either on her tongue,
she believed what she tasted was butter. She did not know that she
was only tasting
milkfat
and salt,
the things that make up butter, which, of course, is not the same thing. She
certainly did not know that the taste of butter was a thing that had once made
her moan. Ava did not remember what it was to moan.

Standing at the
green-checkered, Formica-topped table in her parents' kitchen, on a drizzly
Saturday in August, Ava spread butter thickly on a slice of toast and yawned
heavily. It was just after four in the morning and she was still in her
nightgown, a pale yellow, plain thing, and her hair was tied up under a
kerchief. She was thirty years old, but she looked and felt years older,
especially on mornings like this one, when the damp got into her elbows and
knees and the joints of her hands, down in the marrow, and settled there.
Buttering the toast, her fingers felt stiff and unwilling.

She placed the toast on a plate in front of her
husband, Paul, who smiled tiredly up at her from his seat at the table.

"You look half asleep," she told him, as she
poured him more orange juice.

"I'm
alright," he said, chewing slowly.

They had been
married four years and this was one of their rituals. Whenever Paul took a
night shift at the cleaning company where he sometimes worked, he had to skip
dinner. By the time he got home in the morning he was exhausted and didn't want
to eat a whole meal and go to bed on a full stomach, so Ava got up early and
made him a couple of slices of toast, and she sat with him while he ate. When
they were first married, he took night shifts often, but over the years that
followed he had taken them only when they needed extra money for something
specific. Lately, though, in the last few months, he had been picking them up
after his regular shifts at the hotel, where he worked full-time. This change
had come about because he had finally secured a long-time-coming promotion at
the hotel, to day manager, and between the two of them they were making enough
money to afford their own house, and Paul was picking up the night shifts for
extra money for a down payment. Twice in the last week he hadn't gotten home
until nearly dawn, and once they had only had time to kiss goodbye as Ava
passed him on her way out to catch her bus to work at the museum.

"We got
jam?" Paul asked.

Ava shook her head. “You asked me that already.”

“I did?” he asked, his eyes red and half-closing.

"You
working too much."

He rubbed his
eyes and some of the butter from his fingertips left a tiny smear on his
eyelid. "How we gone get a house if I don't work?"

"We already
got a house," Ava said.

Paul sighed and
stuffed what was left of his toast into his mouth. "This aint our house,
Ava," he said thickly.

Ava took the
last slice of toast from the toaster and buttered it, thinking about this house
and her husband's renewed determination to leave it, which she did not share.
She had lived here almost her entire life, since she was four years old. And
while she could not remember very much about her early childhood here, she
could remember some things, like the day, twenty-six years ago, when they moved
in, when she first saw the red wallpaper, which her parents had hated, but
which Ava thought, and later convinced them, was the most perfect wallpaper anyone
had ever hung. It had faded in only the last seventeen years as if it had been
fifty years, and
a grayness
now lived inside the red.

Still, Ava had grown up playing
hide and seek
under this very counter where she now stood buttering
Paul's bread, and playing jacks on this floor, underneath the kitchen table
with her siblings. If she tried very hard, she could almost, but not really,
remember how the jacks sounded when they scraped against the linoleum, and how
the ball bounced. But the luster on the tiles was gone now, and whenever you
sat a heavy dish on the green-checkered table it wobbled on its rusty legs. The
glass vase that had sat for years in the table's center, which had been given
to her parents by Miss Maddy, their across-the-street neighbor and then-friend,
had held flowers from her mother's bushes out in the backyard. Yellow roses,
fat and lush as bowls of paint. Their fallen petals like
paintdrops
on the tabletop. But the rosebushes were gone now, too, abandoned to the mass
of strangling weeds that had suffocated the rest of the flower garden, and the
vegetable garden, and had even attacked the back porch, where the weeds had
crept over the banisters and up through the floorboards, which were loose and
uneven now, just as they were in every room of the house.

And indeed there was an unevenness about the house
itself, an eccentricity in its character, an imbalance in its light and air, so
that in the daytime the sunlight coming in through the windows only cast itself
into certain areas of a room, and avoided others, so shadows fell in odd ways,
elongated in the wrong places or unnaturally cut in half. And when a gust of sudden
air, sometimes hot, other times frigid, entered or left a room for no reason,
as often happened, it sometimes took a person’s breath away.

But Ava had been read stories at bedtime, and lost
baby teeth, under this roof. She had bled like a woman for the first time here,
and for the last. And though it had been years since she had known any real joy
within these walls, any bliss,
years
even since she
could clearly remember old joys and blisses, she still felt a connection to the
house, and a kinship with it.

Ava handed Paul the last piece of toast, then turned
back to the counter to wipe away the crumbs there. Paul watched her while
chewing. He did not understand why she felt so strongly about this one thing,
about not leaving this house. Indifference was usually the most apparent
feature in Ava's personality. It was a fact about her that Paul had noticed
when they had first started going together, nearly five years ago now. Sitting
on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where they had both worked, eating
beef stew Ava had brought from the cafeteria where she was a server, Paul had
invited her to see
Buck and the Preacher
with him after work.

"Alright," she'd said.

"You like
Sidney Poitier?" he’d asked her, grinning, happy.

She shook her
head. "Not that much."

"Oh.” His
grin slipped. "Well. We can see something else."

"No, it's
fine," Ava had said. "Anything is fine."

He had liked
that quality in her then, because he had mistaken it for easy-goingness and he
didn't like fussy women anyway, women who had to have everything just so. Over
time, though, he had come to see the downside of it. It wasn't that she always
agreed with him about things. She didn’t. But when she disagreed she never
argued, and Paul felt this was because, whatever her opinion on a particular
subject, she never felt strongly about it, and certainly not enough to fight
over it. In all the time they'd known each other, they had never had a real
fight. Paul tried to pick fights with Ava, sometimes, when he was very angry or
frustrated about something and needed a fight. But as soon as he raised his
voice she would completely lose interest in whatever they were talking about
and he would be left even more frustrated than when he started. It was only
when it came to the subject of leaving this house that Ava was
uncharacteristically vehement. Not in her tone, because she would not fight
about it, but in her consistency. No matter what Paul said, no matter how much
he insisted over the last four years, Ava would not even consider leaving that
house.

"Don’t you
want something that’s just for us?" he asked her now for the hundredth
time, tiredly, passively, between bites of toast.

She glanced over
her shoulder at him and shrugged.

When she put the butter back into the refrigerator, a
little bit got on the skin between her thumb and forefinger and, as usual, she
did not really taste it when she licked it away.

***

Standing outside a darkened row house on a sleeping
street, George Delaney lit a cigarette and flipped up his collar against the
chilly breeze that was blowing a very light rain around. It was early August,
but the last few mornings had felt more like April, wet and chilly as early
spring. A glance at his wristwatch confirmed that it was just after four in the
morning, which was about what he'd figured. He'd spent almost two hours in
Butch's basement.

His own house was only ten blocks away and he started
towards it, walking briskly past the graffiti-marked buildings that populated
that side of Market Street, down cracked sidewalks where weeds punched up
through the broken concrete, half-illuminated by the big, butter-yellow
moon.
 

Even at this hour, there was some car traffic on
Chestnut Street. As George waited at the corner for it to pass, he saw a man
rummaging through a trash bin on the opposite corner. The way he was bent over
it made George think of his father, who had sometimes poked around in trash
bins, and had even perused the town dump, looking for interesting things he
could use for sculpture. Once, he had found a bag full of keys, and had used
them, together with the pole from a stop sign some drunk had knocked over, to
make a piece he had said was about broken promises. George, then just a boy,
hadn’t understood the strange-looking thing.

As he crossed
the street, coming closer to the man picking through the trash, George noticed
that his coat was very like the one his father used to wear, a heavy black pea
coat with large pockets and collar, cherished from his days in the Navy. And
the man's hat was like one his father had often worn, too. Gray felt with a
dark green band. George had the strangest thought that this was his father,
alive again somehow, and he reached out and put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Daddy?” he
asked, in a voice so soft it was almost lost on the wet breeze.

The man turned,
and it was not his father’s face he saw, but his son’s. George Jr.’s. Looking
at him with wide, deathful eyes. George gasped and stumbled backward. But in a
flash the face had changed. The old bum looked at him as if he were crazy.

“I aint
yo
daddy, nigga," he said, through missing teeth.
"Is you drunk?”

George felt a weakness in his knees and he had to grab
hold of the
trash can
to get his balance. As soon as
he got it, he pulled his jacket tighter around him and walked quickly home.

Ava lay beneath her husband, listening to his soft
moaning and watching the early-blue sky through the open curtains at the
bedroom window. It was
melty
, streaky blue, the moon
fatty yellow, the kind of moon she and her brother used to call
savory
because it looked like you could
reach up and dip your finger in it and scoop yourself out a taste.

Paul shifted his weight from one elbow to the other.
Ava could hear, mixed in with his moaning, the loose floorboard under the right
side of the bed as it creaked with each thrusting motion he made. It had been
loose for months, ever since they had brought the new dresser in and had
snagged a nail in the floorboard while pushing the dresser against the wall.
Paul had said he’d take care of it, but with all the hours he worked, and with
all the other things that needed repairing in the house, he’d never gotten to
it.
I should fix that,
Ava thought.
It’s just a matter of a hammer and a nail.
It won’t take more than a few seconds.

Paul suddenly stopped thrusting and squinted down at
her in the dark. “What?” he whispered.

It took Ava a
moment to realize that she had not just thought about the loose floorboard, but
had said something about it out loud.

Paul frowned,
and his frown was like a little
boy’s
. “That’s what
you thinking about right now?”

“I’m not
thinking about it. It just crossed my mind for a second.”

“You want me to
do something different?” he asked her.

“No,” she said,
putting her hand on his backside to let him know it was
alright
to keep going. He buried his face in the curve of her neck and shoulder, pushed
himself
deeper inside her, and groaned.

Ava stifled a yawn.

Twenty minutes later, when Paul was ready to come, he
raised up onto his elbows and looked in her eyes, and Ava kissed him, softly biting
his bottom lip the way she knew he liked, so that he came with a shudder, just
as a loud crash and the tinkling sound of shattering glass rang through the
house.

“What the hell
is that?” Paul whispered, getting out of bed and fumbling for his drawers in
the dark. When he got them on, he said, “Stay here, baby,” and crept out into
the even darker hallway.