Speaking of Summer. Kalisha Buckhanon
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article on the pile of filing I needed to finish. It was destined for a manila folder of similar Hedgewood Sentinel keepsakes: our honor roll and graduation listings, annual events we attended, my parents’ obituaries.
It felt spooky to dip my hands into thatched dark bamboo cubes where Summer kept odds and ends in her living room workspace. I remembered her in there, on stained beige sheets, curled cross-legged in the corner or on her stomach. Our candles and incense mostly covered the smells of her pastime: not just paint, but the enamel and glues. I kept her unfinished statement in that space. She shredded fashion brand names and labels she cut from stacks of magazines. She glued them to canvas and spray painted them in light metallic tones. She was just half done on the side where she managed to rubber-cement scraps into texture and grade. It was part of her efforts to join the natural and “meaningful” art crowd, to be more politically and less personally focused, to go the direction the art blogs and dark bar small talk told her to if she wanted notice. I didn’t get it. I liked her less flashy work with faces, as damned and disgruntled as she intended them to be.
“Nobody cares about Black angst anymore, Autumn,” she said about them.
For that acerbic take, I helped her wrap and stack her oil and chalk portraits of imaginary friends. Together, we buried them down in our cellar storage space. It gave me something to do to retrieve them again. She rarely framed. It was too expensive. So I carried the light canvases up a few flights, at night, all by myself. The neighbor boy, from the floor beneath us, helped me once. I was fine alone. But he insisted. He reminded me when young adulthood smelled like red candy, grass, and Vaseline. And not because those were his scents. It was because they were not. Nowadays young people smelled like sour candy, smoke, and electric current. His efforts, and Summer’s laziest paintings, gave me occasion to talk fondly about where I came from.
These makings were nostalgic, juvenile even, as she took subjects like our old backyard shed, and titled it Summer: A fringe of pastel dots along the shed’s bottom border was supposed to be the petunias, marigolds, and geraniums sprouting every year. Autumn could have been mistaken as saturated honey wands bundled together. It was the little-girl view from our bedroom window down onto the front yard every fall, before the gilded boughs of oak trees detassled. Another picture was Grandma’s rocking chair. I recalled it towering to the height of my chest, proud for a mere piece of furniture. Summer rendered it squat and flabby. She painted a mock family portrait of stray cats we used to feed, though I did not recall them in the dull colors she portrayed. So much of her work on our old house was hasty and incorrect, as if she rushed to document the nest before Mama sold it.
Her other artworks were the same unrevealing things, mostly peddled online and at little fairs and to Harlem shop owners, because she couldn’t figure out the people and places and games to leap into real galleries. I gave up on her stuff to go to my photo albums she hated—the cheap sticky plastic-sheet kind. I thumbed through pig-tailed school pictures, shots of frilly dresses at dances. They weren’t fancy art, but I know Summer pulled the albums off my shelf often. She always put them back crooked or out of order. A few really old ones were upside down. I savored those most, because they were filled with my father and his family.
Over the years, we girls became Spencers in name only. Birthday and Christmas presents stopped from my father’s side of the family. They missed our graduations. If Mama didn’t make efforts to take us to see them, we didn’t see them. Summer and I talked often about forcing a relationship with Daddy’s people, all the aunts and uncles and cousins we used to see at the funerals until we stopped flying back home to even see Mama. The money dried up. Our tries at dream jobs demanded us. Time, we thought, was tight. Now, I had regrets. I wanted more heritage in my future.
I went to my desktop to check the train schedules back to my hometown. Fairly straight shots from Penn Station to Chicago’s Union Station, then one short layover until a route would drop me off in back of Hedgewood’s main post office. The ticket price was not high. Perhaps Mama’s death pushed Summer into regret about distance from the Spencers. For all I knew, she was back home. The Big Mamas were feeding her well. She was looking at our baby pictures in their photo albums. She was hearing what our father was like as a child. She was closing that past wound, finding that part of herself, reclaiming a legacy. She was driving past our old house on Trummel Lane, to relive blissful times when the biggest thing we had to manage was time: to rake all the leaves, to dodge every earthworm after a rainstorm, to chase down our school bus filled with pink and yellow faces we never fully fit with.
“But why not do all that with me?” I asked out loud.
The Hedgewood Police Department was little to no help. Summer was not a formal resident there for almost twenty years. We left for college and never looked back for more than holiday visits. We became expatriates and rebels relatives eventually forgot.
House lights, streetlights, and headlights from Harlem’s dense population appeared like iridescent algae through my front windows. I dreamt of the journey, adventure, and escape Summer found. Even when I should have, I never considered leaving New York. Now blocks of darkened houses, low rooftops, and spread-out silence seemed a solution worth fleeing for. I would reach out to family again soon.
By the end of the night, I proved Montgomery and myself wrong. Not one earmarked page of Summer’s books indicated anything but her observations on color, shading, angle, and lines. The occasional biographical tidbit she found interesting, but little more. My sole discovery was a detached eyelash.
Useless memories and thoughts took over too many moments. I could never complete a thing without them. They were my water cooler breaks from hoping, wishing, waiting, and listening for Summer’s key to turn the front door lock. I could not get through a night without believing I heard that sound.
I grabbed a pen to write on my necessary “To Do” list waiting, always, on the kitchen counter. I crossed off the first thing.
1. Look through Summer’s things again.
2. Respond to emails from the precious few clients who are not abandoning me for tardiness, slow response, and my typos in their content.
3. Renew subscriptions to Entertainment Weekly and Writer’s Digest.
4. Go out for toilet paper.
5. Skip the wine tonight.
6. Eat.
I procrastinated on numbers two through six. They weren’t as important as braving to peek more inside Summer beyond what her work showed me, and indeed all of us, for quite a while. We were the ones who chose to think hauntings and disorder were just her chosen “style,” all about art, with no truth in the bones.
At night, the heat in my top-floor apartment was punishing. Practically speaking, the building’s old boiler did what it was supposed to. Theoretically, the temperature could have easily arisen from Mama and Grandma’s spirits boiling over. Their lecture would start off like this: We raised you so much better than this.
I couldn’t deny it. You did, I’d respond.
They would be referring to how I let my grief, immaturity, and needs cloud my judgment to give in to a man who was not really mine. A man who still cried about Summer sometimes, and I let him. The confusion and stress he and I both felt, me more than him, had driven him away for weeks. Tonight was his first back with me again.
I planned, in time, to tell Detective Montgomery, and anyone else who could help, that I had indiscretions with my sister’s man and I know she sensed it, in an intuitive mist where all women know what that odd call or perfume scent means.
I limited it. He respected that. We never spoke of it. She never confronted us. Life went on. I exhaled. I thought she’d never know. Now, I had to consider she did.
At first, Chase Armstrong was just one of the constants I could depend on as Mama was passing away. He was always there, whenever we needed him. He belonged to Summer, but I knew he was there for me, too. Summer was no real help with Mama’s affairs, doctor’s