The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie Page A

before
her now, in the foyer, and although she still felt a little bit lightheaded, a
little bit off-kilter, she did not feel the thing that had surged up in her and
made her kiss a strange woman on the mouth. She frowned, a little disappointed.
    “Well,” she said to Helena, “have a safe trip.”
    “Thank you, Ava.”
    “Promise you’ll
come and see us again,” Sarah said, looking unhappy, and Helena promised she
would.
    Paul had offered to accompany his sister to the train
station down at Thirtieth Street and now he grabbed her suitcase and portfolio
and walked behind her out the door.
    They made it as far as the front porch before Ava rushed
out after them. “Stay a few days,” she said.
    Both Helena and Paul turned and looked at her. She
could not read the look on Helena’s face, but Paul looked confused.
    “Y’all can really catch up,” Ava said. “Wouldn’t that
be nice, Paul?”
    Paul hesitated. Then nodded. “I guess so.”
    “It’s not too
much trouble?” Helena asked, looking at Paul, not Ava. “Y’all have room?”
    “We can make it
work,” Ava said.
    Sarah looked
ready to shit with excitement. “This is wonderful!” she shrieked. “You can take
my room, Helena, and I’ll sleep with Mama.”
    Helena insisted she was an easy guest and that she didn’t
want them going to any trouble for her. “You’ll probably forget I’m here,” she
said. But it did not turn out that way at all.

 
    ***
    “What’s Baltimore like?” Sarah asked Helena. They were
sitting on the back porch steps now, drinking iced tea and smoking, because the
kitchen had become too hot for habitation.
    “It’s not that
different from Philadelphia,” Helena told her. “Smaller. They have good
seafood. Especially crab legs.”
    “Ooh,” Sarah
said.
    Paul rolled his
eyes. Sarah was spreading it on thick. What was so special, all of a sudden,
about crab legs?
    “What do you do, Miss Sarah?” Helena asked.
    “You mean for
work?”
    “Sure. But also
tell me what you do for play. What makes you happy when you do it.”
    Sarah was not
used to anyone showing any real interest in her. She had spent her life from
aged two to fifteen being stuck in the shadow of Ava’s specialness, and the
years since stuck in the shadow of Geo’s death, and she could not recall, in
all of her adult life, ever being asked what she did that made her happy. She
told Helena that she worked at a bank as a teller and had for several years. As
for what she did that made her happy, she said there was nothing.
    “But there must
be. Think harder.”
    She thought
harder. “I don’t know. I like to knit. I make sweaters in the winter.”
    “Does that make
you happy?”
    Sarah shrugged.
She felt disappointed that she couldn’t come up with anything, not because it
meant that there was nothing in her life that made her happy, which there
wasn’t, but because she feared she couldn’t hold the interest of the only
person who had shown any interest in her in a very long time. Worried that
Helena would think she was unworthy of her attention, she blurted out, “ I used to love a man who was happy about fire.”
    Helena clapped
her hands together, delighted. “Tell me.”
    “It’s silly,”
Sarah said.
    “That’s all the
better,” Helena assured her.
    Paul, who had
never imagined that Sarah had loved any man, leaned forward a little on the
step.
    Sarah hesitated.
She had never told anyone about the man before. “This was years ago,” she said.
“Back in sixty-nine. When I used to work way down in Old City, at the bank on
Chestnut. At lunch time , in the summer, I used to walk
down to Penn’s Landing. There was a man I always walked by. A
street performer. A fire-eater. People was always gathered around him, watching him do his tricks. At first, I never
stopped. I thought it was stupid, I thought he should go get a real job. But
every time I walked by, I’d see the fire out the corner of my eye and wonder
how he did it.”
    Helena