“It’s a house. Better than this,” she says, turning the dial on the stove from five to two. “This” is the projects, but if Brenda was to go back forty or fifty years to the backwoods of Texas and see what and where me and my eleven sisters and brothers was brought up, she wouldn’t be complaining. She got running water. A bathroom with a toilet that flush. A phone that work since I been here. And two whole bedrooms for three little kids. That’s all we had, too. She ain’t got to worry about no rats. Nothing but a few straggly roaches every now and then. So. “This” ain’t so bad, is what I’m thinking as I look around. It all depends on your frame of reference.

We had to take turns working on the farm, so some of us went to school and some of us didn’t. After two of my other brothers got killed fooling around with a forklift, Daddy sent me up to Chicago to live with his brother. I was only in the tenth grade. He wanted me to graduate. I liked school. Wanted to finish. Did, too. When I left Texas, I already knew how most things worked. I’d watched my daddy operate machinery and run the farm. I knew how to cook. Knew how to put two and two together. Even figured out how to make a living without a good education. Sometimes it was hard. Sometimes it was easy. I still thank college woulda been the best way to go. If I had my druthers. But. It’s almost April. It’s 1994. I’m on the other side of middle age. Supposed to be retired. And here I am. Starting over.

“The IRS got a lien against the house,” I say. “So you could say I don’t even own it.”

“What’s a lien?” Brenda asks, setting some paper plates on the table with clean plastic spoons she gets out the silverware drawer. She got two or three real forks and case knives in there too, which me and her usually eat with. I been meaning to stop in Target and buy two sets. They ain’t but $19.99 each, and the handles come in different colors.

“A lien is when the IRS get mad ’cause you didn’t pay your taxes and they let everybody in the world know it. You can’t get no credit nowhere, and you can’t sell the house till you pay them first. If you don’t pay nothing for a long time, they charge you so much interest and then penalties on top of the interest, that it add up to ten times more than you owed in the first place. If you can’t keep up the payments, they do not feel sorry for you at all. They can and will take everything you own to get their money, even if it mean taking your house, your car, your wedding ring, anything you got that’s worth something. This is what happened to Redd Foxx.”