The Summer We Got Free Read Online Free PDF

Ava to Sarah. “Where’s your
brother? I know he aint still sleep at this time of day.”
    Ava and Sarah
did not have a brother anymore, but neither of them said a word and hoped the
moment would pass without incident. It didn’t.
    “I better go
wake him up,” Regina said, standing.
    Sarah and Ava both stood at the same time. Ava moved
quickly to the kitchen door and stood in front of it.
    "Where you going, Mama?" Sarah asked,
standing directly in front of Regina. “Why don’t you sit back down and finish
your breakfast?”
    “No. I just said I’m gone go wake Geo up. Is you deaf,
girl?” Regina grabbed her daughter’s shoulders and tried to move her aside. She
was bigger than Sarah, but the younger woman held her ground.
    “You want to go
back outside and see about your tomatoes?” Ava asked.
    Regina ignored
Ava, her face growing strained and lined with the effort of trying to move Sarah,
and Ava knew that any second her mother was going to snap and get angry and
start screaming, or worse.
    “How about some peppermint tea, Mama?” Sarah asked.
    Regina stopped
suddenly. She blinked. “Oh, yeah,” she said, releasing Sarah’s shoulders. “ That sound good.”
    They were relieved to have figured out the One Thing.
There was always something, one thing, that Regina
really wanted at any given time. Ever since their mother had gone Saturday
Morning Crazy, identifying that one thing was the only way they could get her
to stop doing something they didn’t want her to be doing and get her to do
something else.
    Sarah hurried to the stove and put on just enough
water for one cup of tea, so it would boil faster. Ava helped Regina back into
her chair.
    Still at the refrigerator with his orange juice,
George, though he tried not to, could not help remembering how often he had gone into his son’s room on mornings
like this, before school or church, to sometimes physically pull him from his
bed, because the boy, from the time he was ten, refused to get up on time. “How
you gone hold down a job if you can’t get your ass out of bed in the morning?”
George had often asked him. “ Lemme tell you something,
boy. It’s always gone be somebody trying to lock you up, or kill you, and aint
nobody ever gone give you nothing, so you better get ready to do for yourself,
and that means getting up when it’s time to get up. You hear me?” But the boy
had never learned. He had overslept, and been late for school, on the last
morning he ever saw.

1950

 
    W hen the Delaneys came to Radnor Street, on a Saturday in early fall
of 1950, on a cloudy morning, several of their new neighbors stood at their
front windows and watched them with a kind of interest that most of them could
not quite understand. It was an interest that kept them rooted in place behind windowscreens , almost unable to look away from the young
family, but which, at the same time, made them hesitate to go out and say hello.
    Maddy Duggard peered through
her front window from across the street as they unloaded a car full of their
belongings and through the steam coming up from her morning coffee she assessed
them. The woman looked to be in her early twenties, though the coat she was
wearing, a pretty purple dress coat with beige cuffs and a high, stylish
collar, gave her an air of some maturity and sophistication, as did the way she
walked and the way she held her shoulders. The man was thin and sandy, and he
grasped their moving boxes with hands that were almost too large for his thin
frame. A little girl sat on the front steps of the house, and two smaller
children, a boy and girl, ran around on the porch. It was mostly the smallest
girl who Maddy watched. Each time the child’s mother took a box from the back
of the old pickup they had parked out front of the house, and carried it
inside, the little girl followed her. Each time the child disappeared into the
house, Maddy found herself staring at the doorway in anticipation, until she appeared
again.