The Summer We Got Free by Mia McKenzie Page A

got through the week with Mother Haley in the house without
snatching the woman bald-headed, she'd buy herself
    that hat she'd seen in a store window on Sixtieth Street
and wear it to church, feeling weighed in the balance and found worthy as Job.
    "Red aint
no kind of color for walls," was the first thing Mother Haley said when
she entered the house.
    "I love
them,” said Regina, who had only ever tolerated the red walls before.
    Mother Haley’s lips twisted into a purposeful frown.
    Regina fixed ham
hocks and rice for dinner, and watched as her mother-in-law sniffed each bite, then tasted it with the tip of her tongue before eating it,
and she decided she'd buy herself that hat if she made it through the night
without killing her.
    George did not seem to enjoy having his mother there
any more than Regina did.
    "He on edge all the time," Regina told
Maddy, a couple of days into Mother Haley’s visit, sitting in Maddy’s kitchen, smoking and watching her friend chop
onions for a meatloaf. "And he look fit to jump off any minute. He quicker
to criticize, quicker to holler about nothing."
    Maddy frowned. "I thought you said they was
close.”
    "They was when he was
growing up. And she still always the first person he call when he get a little
raise at work, or Pastor Goode ask him to do some special job for the church.
But it's something else there, too."
    "Something like what?"
    "I don't know. Sometime I see him watching her
with a kind of meanness in his eyes, when she aint doing nothing but washing
the dishes or sweeping the front porch. And she aint got to do a whole lot more
than look at George Jr. before George get his drawers in a twist."
    Just the day before, when Geo had run into the house
from the backyard, crying, with his knee slightly skinned and barely bleeding,
Mother Haley had said, “Don’t cry now. You a big boy, and a big, strong boy
don’t cry like that.”
    George had frowned over his newspaper and said, “Mama,
he aint a big, strong boy, he only six, and he can cry if he want to.”
    When George had come home later that same evening he
had found his mother holding George Jr., cradling him and talking sweetly,
saying, “You a sweet boy. Aint you just the sweetest thing?”
    George had stormed up to her, his nostrils flared, his
bulgy eyes huge. “Don’t coddle him like that, Mama,” he’d said, through
clenched teeth. “You gone soften him up too much.”
    “George, what’s the matter with you?” his mother had
demanded.
    He hadn’t answered, had simply taken the child from
his grandmother’s arms and put him down on the floor.
    “I wasn’t doing him no harm,” said Mother Haley, as
Geo skipped off happily. “I raised you ,
didn’t I?”
    George had walked away.
    Regina had gone upstairs a while later and found him
lying on their bed, staring up at the ceiling, his eyebrows drawn tight on his
forehead.
    "What's the matter with you?"
    "Nothing."
    "She's your mother. You the one told her she could come stay."
    "You know she don't wait for me to tell her she
can do something.”
    “He spent the rest of that evening alone in the
bedroom,” Regina told Maddy. “Yelling for me to shut the children up when they
played too loud.”
    Maddy frowned over her meatloaf. “Well, how much
longer she gone be here?”
    “Two more weeks,” said Regina, feeling tired.

 
    The next Sunday, the Delaneys took up one more seat than usual on the pew at Blessed Chapel. Mother Haley sat
between George Jr. and his father, and spent much of the service straightening
either George’s tie, picking lint off either George’s lapel, and reminding
either George to sit up straighter in the pew, because, after all, they were in
God’s house, and it was bad manners to slouch on anybody’s couch, let alone the
Almighty’s.
    It was late
April, and it was hot inside the sanctuary. Large fans that were mounted high
on the walls re-circulated the warm air around the chapel, lightly blowing the
feathers on