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doesn’t really taste like anything to me.”

 
    Regina had gone to the kitchen to take out the frozen
meat for that night’s dinner, to let it thaw, and she saw through the window
her daughters sitting out on the porch with Paul’s sister. As she watched them,
George came in and stood beside her at the sink. “You back?” he asked.
    “I’m back.”
    He peered out the window. “She still here? I thought
she had a train to catch.”
    “She’s staying a
little while. To catch up with her brother.”
    George frowned.
    “I’m glad,”
Regina said. “Look how happy Sarah looks. And Ava. I aint seen Ava so
interested in anybody or anything in seventeen years.”
    George shrugged.
“I don’t know what they think is so interesting about her. I don’t like her.
She rubs me the wrong way.”
    Regina waved a
dismissive hand at him. “She a nice girl.”
    “How you know
what kind of girl she is? We don’t know her. Her own brother
don’t even know her. He aint seen her in twenty years. Who knows what she came here for?”
    She rolled her
eyes. “What you think she came here for, George? To swindle us out of our
family fortune?”
    “Why you always
got to have a sarcastic answer for everything?”
      “Because you looking for a reason not to like
her.”
    “Why would I?”
    “Because she here.
Because she seem to want to know us, and deep down you think it’s something
wrong with anybody who want to be around us, who don’t treat us like Pastor
Goode and the rest of ‘ em .
You was the same way with Paul when he first started coming around.”
    “That’s
ridiculous,” George said, and he believed it was. He didn’t like the woman
because of her questions. Watching through the window now, as she talked to Ava
and Sarah, he saw that same searching in her eyes as she had when she looked at
all of them. He wondered what it was she was searching for and, no matter what
Regina said, he felt sure she wasn’t there just to catch up with her brother.
“How long is a few days?” he asked.
    Regina shrugged.
    George sighed
and shook his head, just as Helena’s eyes met his through the window.

1950

 
 
    B lessed Chapel
Church of God stood near the corner of Fifty-Ninth and Radnor, right at the end
of the block, and both Regina and George felt good about living on a street
with a church. It was another reason they had chosen the house. They were both
still a little uneasy about living in the city. The block they had just moved
from, and the neighborhood that surrounded it, over in southwest Philadelphia, had
been plagued with crime. In the five years they had been there, there had been
a murder only a few blocks away from their house, and several muggings, two of
them at their own corner. And while they both believed that the good Lord
watched over them no matter where they were or what they were doing—or, at
least, while Regina believed that; George felt there were some places the Lord
would not go, some things the Lord would not watch—they both felt that
having a church right on the corner made the street safer. The very first
Sunday after they moved onto Radnor Street, they went to join Blessed Chapel.
    It was a large
church, twice the size of the church they had attended for the last five years
and four or five times the size of the church they had grown up in, down in Hayden.
It was made of stone and mortar and stood two stories high. It had a huge,
cool, sunken basement with several rooms, including two changing rooms for
choir members, two classrooms, a kitchen where meals were cooked and sold on
Sundays and holidays, and a chapel and altar, behind which there was a
baptismal pool. On the upper floor, there was a large, main chapel, where
Sunday service took place. It had thirty pews and two choir boxes. The carpeting
in the sanctuary was dark red and lush. There was a large pulpit, with an organ
and a piano. All the windows around the main chapel were stained-glass and each depicted a scene from