The Summer We Got Free (7 page)

“Don’t you like
ice cream?” Helena asked Ava.

Ava shook her
head. “No,” she said, and she recognized the strangeness of her words as she
said them. “It doesn’t really taste like anything to me.”

Regina had gone to the kitchen to take out the frozen
meat for that night’s dinner, to let it thaw, and she saw through the window
her daughters sitting out on the porch with Paul’s sister. As she watched them,
George came in and stood beside her at the sink. “You back?” he asked.

“I’m back.”

He peered out the window. “She still here? I thought
she had a train to catch.”

“She’s staying a
little while. To catch up with her brother.”

George frowned.

“I’m glad,”
Regina said. “Look how happy Sarah looks. And Ava. I aint seen Ava so
interested in anybody or anything in seventeen years.”

George shrugged.
“I don’t know what they think is so interesting about her. I don’t like her.
She rubs me the wrong way.”

Regina waved a
dismissive hand at him. “She a nice girl.”

“How you know
what kind of girl she is? We don’t know her. Her own
brother
don’t
even know her.
He aint seen her in twenty years.
Who knows what she came here for?”

She rolled her
eyes. “What you think she came here for, George? To swindle us out of our
family fortune?”

“Why you always
got to have a sarcastic answer for everything?”

 
“Because you looking for a reason not to like
her.”

“Why would I?”

“Because she here.
Because she seem to want to know us, and deep down you think it’s something
wrong with anybody who want to be around us, who don’t treat us like Pastor
Goode and the rest of
‘
em
.
You was the same way with Paul when he first started coming around.”

“That’s
ridiculous,” George said, and he believed it was. He didn’t like the woman
because of her questions. Watching through the window now, as she talked to Ava
and Sarah, he saw that same searching in her eyes as she had when she looked at
all of them. He wondered what it was she was searching for and, no matter what
Regina said, he felt sure she wasn’t there just to catch up with her brother.
“How long is a few days?” he asked.

Regina shrugged.

George sighed
and shook his head, just as Helena’s eyes met his through the window.

1950

B
lessed Chapel
Church of God stood near the corner of Fifty-Ninth and Radnor, right at the end
of the block, and both Regina and George felt good about living on a street
with a church. It was another reason they had chosen the house. They were both
still a little uneasy about living in the city. The block they had just moved
from, and the neighborhood that surrounded it, over in southwest Philadelphia, had
been plagued with crime. In the five years they had been there, there had been
a murder only a few blocks away from their house, and several muggings, two of
them at their own corner. And while they both believed that the good Lord
watched over them no matter where they were or what they were doing—or, at
least, while Regina believed that; George felt there were some places the Lord
would not go, some things the Lord would not watch—they both felt that
having a church right on the corner made the street safer. The very first
Sunday after they moved onto Radnor Street, they went to join Blessed Chapel.

It was a large
church, twice the size of the church they had attended for the last five years
and four or five times the size of the church they had grown up in, down in Hayden.
It was made of stone and mortar and stood two stories high. It had a huge,
cool, sunken basement with several rooms, including two changing rooms for
choir members, two classrooms, a kitchen where meals were cooked and sold on
Sundays and holidays, and a chapel and altar, behind which there was a
baptismal pool. On the upper floor, there was a large, main chapel, where
Sunday service took place. It had thirty pews and two choir boxes. The carpeting
in the sanctuary was dark red and lush. There was a large pulpit, with an organ
and a piano. All the windows around the main chapel were
stained-glass
and each depicted a scene from 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, was helping her to raise them; and besides them a dozen more, most
of whom—though the
Delaneys
did not know it—had
been peering through their windows as they had unloaded their belongings the
previous day. Most of them still did not understand what it was that had made
them hesitate for just over half an hour that first morning. Doris was among
the few who could name it, who could attribute it to the lack of fear she saw
in the four-year-old Ava, but even she could not say exactly why it made her so
uneasy. Whatever the reason was, once the ice was broken with the new family, once
Maddy and Malcolm and Doris had all gone over, most everyone else on the block
made their way over, too, their hesitation giving way to the happy, warmed-up
feelings most of them got from watching the little girl. Vic Jones, who was
Malcolm’s half-brother, had been the next to stop by, and
he
had been followed by Grace and Eddie Kellogg
. By that first night, the
Mitchells, Jane Lucas,
Maddy’s
mother, Henrietta, and
a dozen more had come. Once they were with the
Delaneys
,
drinking coffee in their kitchen, tasting the cobbler Regina had thrown together,
or sharing something they had baked and brought over as a welcome, most had quickly
forgotten their strange hesitation. Up close, the good feelings Ava inspired
had been doubled, tripled in some cases. Grace Kellogg found that the little
girl’s laugh somehow reminded her of the pajamas she had worn as a
child—thick, feet-in pajamas that had kept her warm in the drafty house
her family had lived in for many years. Looking into Ava’s eyes, Jane Lucas
remembered the smile of her love, her young husband, who had died in the war.
When Ava tripped and fell over the edge of the rug while running by at full
speed, Chuck Ellis lifted her up and in that moment he was sure he smelled
morning, though it was six in the evening at the time. These were the people
who made up the congregation of Blessed Chapel and who went out of their way
that first Sunday to make the
Delaneys
welcome,
rearranging themselves on the fifth pew from the front to offer the family good
seats, close to the pulpit and the choir box, the latter of which was filled
that morning with members of the Women’s Choir.

They opened the service with song, a slow song that
got everybody settled, and then an elderly deacon led them all in prayer,
before, finally, Pastor Goode appeared and began the sermon. He spoke about friendship,
about home and community, and the soft light through the stain-glassed windows
fell against his dark robe so that it glowed like embers. When the choir sang
again, the song was bigger, and livelier, and everyone got up out of their
seats and sang along, clapping their hands and stomping
their
feet, shaking their tambourines. The floor shook beneath them. Their voices
soared.

When the service was over, Regina and George took
their children up to meet the pastor. They waited at the back of a small crowd
of folks offering their compliments on the sermon, or asking the pastor for his
prayers, either for themselves or someone they knew who was going through hard
times. When Hattie Mitchell asked him to pray for her mother, who had fallen
ill the week before, Pastor
good
took Hattie’s hand.
“I been praying for her ever since I heard,” he said. “And me and Linda gone stop
by your house tomorrow evening so we can all pray together. Until then, know
that the Lord is with you, and no matter how bad things seem, he will always
make a way.”

When the
Delaneys
got to the
front of the crowd, Regina introduced the children. Pastor Goode shook Sarah’s
hand, and Geo’s, but Regina saw him hesitate, just a fraction of a moment,
before reaching out for Ava’s. When he finally did, he did so smiling, but Ava,
either because she had sensed his hesitation, or for some other reason altogether,
did not take the pastor’s hand when it was offered. Instead, she folded her
arms across her chest. The pastor’s smile 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.