When Never Comes

by Barbara Davis

“I can,” he barks back. As if to make his point, he drops both lamps onto the soggy heap of household belongings. The larger of the two rolls off the pile and onto the pavement with a sickening pop as the bulb implodes. “Says so right in the lease your old lady signed when she moved in. Two months late, you’re out.” A boy carrying an armload of towels and pillows appears in the doorway. He’s not much older than she is—fourteen or fifteen—a younger version of his father, with the same yellow hair, hard jaw, and cold eyes. He fires the pillows out onto the pile from where he stands, then aims a hard little smile at her. It isn’t the first time he’s helped his father evict someone. Eviction. The word fills her with shame. She knows things have been tight, that her mother’s been struggling to make ends meet, stretching the groceries with hot dogs and boxed mac and cheese, but she never realized it was this bad. No wonder she’s been picking up extra shifts at the Piggly Wiggly. And why she always looks so worn-out, like little by little she’s coming apart at the seams. Christy-Lynn is still staring at the sopping heap of their belongings, her gaze locked on a fuzzy purple foot—the stuffed dinosaur her mother had given her for her sixth birthday—when something, a bit of sound or movement, suddenly catches her eye. Her stomach lurches as the curtains part in the window overhead and a pair of faces appear. And they aren’t the only ones watching. All around the complex, people are ...