Sandi’s eagerness to rub his face in the news turned out to be a slight, accidental mercy. She’d given them a full two weeks to make the necessary preparations. Seemed inhumane to have benefited from witnessing Sandi evict some of his previous neighbors. Still though, he’d learned a lot by joining the gawkers at the curb, watching in silence as one of their neighbors got stripped of home and worldly possessions. By now he was familiar with and prepared for Sandi’s eviction drill. Her tobacco juice smirk as she thumbed to a moving truck and asked, “Curb or truck?” Did the evictee prefer their things to get dumped in the lawn, or else hauled off in the truck to a storage warehouse that held a fifty-dollar-a-month ransom on each four-by-four pallet of personal belongings, on top of a two-hundred-dollar moving fee? If forced to choose between having a stranger charge him for his own shit or leaving it to get picked through by the buzzards, then he was damn well going to make a couple bucks off whatever they wouldn’t be needing for life on the road.

The yard sale wasn’t only a last-ditch effort to make some cash. It also denied Sandi the satisfaction of seeing Henry as trounced as all the other evictees as they watched fat men in back braces ransacking their homes, cramming their lives into a truck, or else tossing them out to the lawn. And in spite of all the acid he held for Sandi, he refused to burn this bridge by unleashing whatever was stewing inside him, sure to exit as an eruption of either screams or weeping. Instead, he would set aside pride and spite and swear to pay off all his dues, so they could move back into this park. He was determined to go out with whatever dignity a naked man can muster. He had to.