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

wasn’t right to see your only sister again
after so many years and not be happy. It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy. It wasn’t
that.

 
    ***
    Paul opened the windows in every room, and the back
door, trying to lure a breeze. He had never known it to be so hot inside that
house. It was always cold in there, even in summer. He sat with his sister at
the kitchen table, smoking and listening to her tell about Baltimore, piecing
in some of the parts of her life that he had missed. George had said he was
going to read the paper and left. When Ava and Sarah finished cleaning up, Ava
left, too, mumbling something about housework, but Regina and Sarah stayed, and
it was mostly Sarah who asked questions and engaged Helena, while Paul
listened. She told them how she had put herself through college while working
for a doctor’s family, helping the wife, who was sickly, with their four
children. After she had finished school, she had started teaching third grade
and had taught it for four years before leaving.
    “Aint you gone
miss your students?” Sarah asked her.
    “Yes. But it was
time to move on,” she said. “And I’ve always wanted to move back to New York. I
lived there for a couple of years when I was in my early twenties.” She looked
at her brother then. “What about you, Paul? Have you been in Philadelphia all
this time?”
    He nodded. “I
thought about moving somewhere else after I…well, when I turned eighteen. But
everybody I knew was here, and I guess I aint much of a wanderer.”
    “A little
wandering can be good for the soul, I think,” Helena said. “But so can the
places you know, the places that know you.”
    “I don’t know
about Philly being good for nobody’s soul,” Paul said. “But the cheesesteaks is
good.”
    They all laughed at that, including Regina, who was
still sitting at the table. They looked over at her and it was plain that she
wasn’t laughing with them. She was still staring down into the cup of
peppermint tea that Sarah had reminded her to drink half an hour ago. She
hadn’t looked up from it in all that time. They heard her say something that
sounded like, “Maddy, I miss you.”
    “Is your mother
alright?” Helena whispered.
    Sarah shook her
head no and glanced at the clock on the wall above the kitchen door. “But she ought
to be pretty soon.”
    “Paul, why don’t
we take a walk,” Helena said. “Would you mind, Sarah? If I had a little time
alone with my brother?’
    “Oh. I guess not.”
    Paul frowned. Walking
was the last thing he felt like doing. Next to being alone with his sister.

 
    There was history in the peppermint tea. There was
years ago in it. Staring down into it, Regina could see people and things long
gone. Right there on the surface of the tea, she could see the kitchen
reflected, but it was not the kitchen where she now sat. Gathered around the
table were her children, all three of them together as they had not been in
almost twenty years. A younger incarnation of Regina herself stood by the
stove, watching them, and the lack of worry, the absence of fear in that Regina's
eyes made the Regina sitting at the table want to call out to her other self,
to ask her how she dared look so unafraid when the end of the world was coming.
She opened her mouth to say something to her, something like, "Why don’t
you see?" but the image in the teacup changed then, and instead of her
children around the table she saw Maddy's face. Her
old friend, smiling and laughing, the way Maddy always used to, as if she'd
just told one of those raunchy stories she always liked to tell about her good
for nothing ex-husband, the laughter causing her shoulders to shake as she
threw her head back. "Maddy," Regina whispered to her, "I miss
you, girl." But the Maddy in the tea could not hear her. Regina hunched
down closer to the cup and watched the image on the tea's surface change again.
Reflected there now was the main sanctuary of Blessed Chapel Church of God, on
a