The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie Read Free Book Online

temperature in the house had risen
so much that he’d woken up dripping sweat and couldn’t get back to sleep.
    “You hungry?” George asked. “Ava, get the man
something to eat.”
    “That’s okay, baby, I aint hungry,” Paul said to Ava,
who hadn’t moved anyway. “Where you been living?" he asked his sister.
    “Baltimore,” she said. "After Uncle Reese died,
Aunt Vicky moved down there to be closer to her family, and she took me with
her."
    "Uncle
died, huh?"
    She nodded.
"Stroke."
    "That's a shame," he said, and wondered if
he sounded sincere.
    “She on her way to New York,” Sarah said. “For a
teaching job.”
    “You a teacher?” he asked. “A real one?”
    “Sure.”
    “You went to college, then?”
    She nodded.
    This time his smile came easy.
    “Y’all sit down,” Regina said. “You know I don’t like
people hovering around the table like that.”
    Helena took her seat and Paul went and grabbed an extra
chair from the dining room and placed it next to Ava. "I'm surprised
anybody from the old block knows where I am,” he said. “I aint been back around
the neighborhood much since right after I turned eighteen. Without you and Mama
there it aint feel like home no more. Which was real bad for me, 'cause I was dying
for a little bit of home right then."
    "Well, it
looks like you found it," Helena said, glancing at her brother’s wife. She
asked how long Ava and Paul had been married and what they both did for work.
When Paul said they’d both worked at the art museum, and that Ava still did, Helena
said, "I tried to get a job there when I was a teenager. My best friend
worked there and she talked me up to her boss. He hired me over the phone. But
when he saw me, he changed his mind. He said I was so black I'd distract people
from the art. He said that to my friend, not to me. He told me he'd forgotten
he'd promised the job to somebody else."
    George looked down at his plate.
    Sarah shifted
her weight on her chair, then reached for her coffee.
    Paul remembered
the trouble his sister’s skin had caused them as children, the fights he got
into almost daily in her defense, the fights she got
into herself.
    "Does my
brother ever talk about me?" Helena asked Ava, glancing at Paul.
    “Of course I do,” Paul said. “That’s a silly
question.”
    “I aint heard you mention her but two or three times,”
Regina said. “In what? Five years?”
    “Mama, drink your tea,” Sarah said. “It’s getting
cold.”

 
    When they were done eating breakfast, Helena went to
use the bathroom, and the second she was gone, Sarah cornered Paul at the sink,
where he was stacking plates. “Aint you gone ask your sister to stay?”
    “What you mean,
stay? She on her way to New York for a job.”
    “Yeah, and she
said that interview aint for two weeks. I know she’d like to stay for at least
a few days. You aint seen her in nearly twenty years. You’d feel awful if you let her go away from you again so soon.”
    “Sarah, stop
telling people how they supposed to feel,” George said. “If Paul don’t want her
here, that’s his business.”
    “It aint that I
don’t want her here—”
    “But they ought
to spend at least a week catching up,” Sarah said.
    “Three seconds
ago it was a few days,” George said, “ now it’s a week?”
    Paul shook his
head. “I won’t have no time to spend with her. I’m working
every day and almost every night.”
    Sarah waved a
dismissive hand. “I got the weekend off, and Ava’s off Monday. We can take care
of her when you aint here. Can’t we, Ava?”
    Ava shrugged. “I
don’t know. I guess. If that’s what Paul wants.”
    He mistook her
unusual uneasiness for her usual indifference and in this matter it was
welcome. He didn’t want to be pressured about this. It wasn’t that he didn’t
love his sister, that he hadn’t missed her, but he
knew it seemed that way. Sarah was peering at him and he knew she was wondering
why he was so reluctant. It just