The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie

first, neither woman spoke. Ava could hear Helena’s
breathing, which was as nervous and loud as her own. Then Helena said, “We seem
to be having the strangest effect on each other, don’t we?”
    The lights flickered on, just for a moment. In the
sudden brightness, their eyes met. The next second it was
dark again. Then lightning flashed through the window and Helena
screamed.
    Sarah and Regina came rushing in, followed by Paul and
George, all of them carrying lit candles.
    “What’s wrong?”
Paul asked.
    Helena pointed
at the window over the sink. “There’s someone there.”
    Standing out in
the backyard, looking at them through the window, was
a middle-aged man in a dark bathrobe, standing under a large umbrella. He
squinted at them through thick glasses, not the least concerned, it seemed,
that he’d been caught peering into their house.
    Paul pulled the window open and yelled, “Mind your own
goddamn business!” and Ava could hear the raw anger in his voice.
    The man looked right at Helena and said, “You know who
you keeping company with? The devil’s in this house!”
    Paul yelled, “You better get the hell away from this
window right now, fool, ‘cause if I come out there you gone see the devil for
sure.”
    “We aint scared of you!” the old man yelled back. “We
got the good Lord on our side.”
    Paul made a move away from the window and towards the
back door, and the man quickly moved away from the window, climbing over the
fence that separated their backyard from the one beside it, and disappeared
into the next house.
    “Who was that?” Helena asked, sounding shocked.
    “Dexter Liddy ,” Ava said.
“He lives next door.”
    “Is he crazy?”
    “Out his damn mind,” said Paul. “Just like everybody
else on this street.”
    “They aint all crazy,” Regina said. “They misled,
mostly. And a little stupid, too.”
    Helena shook her head. “I don’t understand. Misled by
whom? About what? About the devil
being in this house? That’s sure something to be misled about.”
    “And a long time to be misled about it, too,” Regina
said.
    George frowned. “She don’t need to know about this.”
    “How you plan on keeping her from knowing it?” Regina
asked her husband. “You think that preacher gone just let us have a nice visit?
Now I think about it, she’s what that brick musta been about.”
    “Can’t be,” said Sarah. “She hadn’t even got here
yet.”
    Regina thought about it, then looked at Helena. “Was this morning the first time you came by here, honey?”
    Helena shook her head. “No. I came by yesterday, early
in the evening, but nobody was at home, so I went on over to our cousin
Tyrone’s place and stayed the night there.”
    Regina nodded. “What I tell you? Goode musta seen her. Or somebody else saw her and went and told
him. With them suitcases, they musta figured she was
coming back. That brick was a warning.”
    “What did it say again?” Paul asked, trying to
remember.
    Sarah frowned. “Something about not making friends
with us.”
    Regina nodded again. “ Mmm hmm.”
    Helena looked back and forth between them all. “A preacher threw a brick at somebody?”
    “At all of us,” Paul said. “He threw it through the
front window. Or told somebody else to. That’s how it really got broke.”
    “Why?”
    “Because everybody on this street got something
against us,” Regina said. “Been that way ever since my son died. You saw that
church across the street?”
    Helena nodded.
    “Well, the preacher I’m talking about is the pastor
over there. Has been for the last twenty-five years. He had a son, too. Same age as mine. They died together. Then his wife died not
even a year later, from the grief. And he blamed us for all of it. He been
trying to get us off this block ever since. And he managed to turn all the rest
of these people against us, too, including that fool who was just looking in
here.”
    “When you say ‘died together’—what does