Junior was wearing long johns and his black parka. The hood was pulled over his head and he’d wrapped Mom’s bese saka shawl into an oversized scarf around his face and shoulders. A tinfoil-bowled flame cast the once vibrant shawl into a muddle of amber and shadows. All Henry could see of the boy’s skin were his hands clicking Legos into a complex, asymmetrical structure that could never be balanced upright to stand on its own. Ever since Michelle had left—ever since Henry’d struck her and thrown her out—the boy had grown stingy with his eye contact. Henry tried willing the boy to look at him now. If the boy did look, would he catch an echo of what Henry’d seen in Papa years ago? A worn-out man at the dining room table, huddled over a checkbook, bills, receipts, and a calculator, diverting all his hours-turned-dollars from one account to the next, calculating subtraction after inevitable subtraction required to maintain a home, to sustain a family.

The boy wouldn’t look up, and so Henry said, “Hey.”

The boy ignored him. Henry repeated himself, louder.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

The boy finally looked up, only to catch his pa looking down. For a moment Henry considered setting the stack of snow-warped envelopes and the eviction notice in the candle’s flame. As if smoke and ash could change anything, as if they could ever amount to something more than their charred weight. The eviction notice had arrived mid-December. Sandi made a theater of staple-gunning each corner into the front door, Henry all the while cowering inside, pretending not to be there, even with his truck parked right out front. After her knocks and jeers stopped, he slipped out to snatch it before Junior got home from school.

NOTICE

You have been evicted from this property by virtue of a Court Order served by the County Sheriff’s Office.

YOUR PRESENCE ON THIS PROPERTY WITHOUT THE EXPRESS PERMISSION OF THE LANDLORD AS OF DECEMBER 31, 2015, WILL BE CONSIDERED TRESPASSING AND MAY RESULT IN YOUR ARREST