Someone bangs on the front door. I lean forward and turn down the TV. The house goes quiet for a minute. Nothing happens. I look out the window and see fresh snow on the ground.

I get up and walk to the hall and turn out the string of white lights hanging from nails in the wall. The ceiling light bulb stopped working last week so Bud and me strung up some Christmas lights from a milk crate in the basement.

Bud paid the electric bill last week with his own money, but we didn’t buy any light bulbs. He paid it with cash from his job. At least he said he got it from working. I believed him. ”We wouldn’t have any light or any TV,” he said. “We wouldn’t be able to cook food.” I went with him to the office building so I would know where to go if I had to do it next time. The lady at the desk counted Bud’s money twice, and then gave him a receipt. She had fat fingers and bright red nail polish. For some reason, she kept looking over at me while she counted the money.

Then the banging starts up again. It sounds like a hammer, like the door will explode. So loud that the house vibrates.

Sis comes into the room. “Someone is here,” she says.

“No kidding,” I say.

“Where is Bud?” she asks.

“I think he’s upstairs.”

“No one ever comes over. Not anymore. No one that knocks,” she says. She’s still too small, small enough to hide underneath the kitchen sink. Hiding is usually her first option. It’s like she’s a runt, or she hasn’t hit a growth spurt yet.

She turns and runs in her yellow socks toward the kitchen. She saw it in a Christmas movie we watched one night. A small kid would hide under the kitchen sink. She went and tried it right away and that became her favorite place to go. “No one else can fit in there,” is what she said.

I follow her to the kitchen. She’s nowhere to be seen but I can hear her shuffling into place. The dishes haven’t been done in days. There’s pots too. Usually I end up doing them since Bud won’t do it and Sis is too small. She can reach the knobs on the faucet with a chair but she can’t wash the dishes without making a huge mess. She tried once last week and broke two plates.

“This is Keith Douglas from the Sheriff’s office,” a booming voice comes from the other side of the front door. “Please open the door or we will be forced to open it the hard way,” says the voice. He sounds like a giant, like a man with huge hands and gigantic feet in heavy boots.

I run up the stairs as fast and as quiet as I can. I go straight into Bud’s room and see that he is still asleep. Bud is 15 but he looks older. People think he’s 17 or 18 because he has black hair on his chin. He works at the gas station on Route 12 and sometimes he stays out pretty late. Sis and I usually just watch TV and then go to sleep on the floor. There’s a small heater with a fan next to the TV.

I move to wake him up. Shake his legs.

“What the fuck?” he says and tries to swat me with his hand.

“Someone at the door,” I say.

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Around eight maybe.”

“Who is it?” he asks. He sits up and rubs his face. His eyes are puffy and red.

“Someone named Keith.”

“Who the hell is that?”

“How should I know? He says he’s from the Sheriff.”

“Where’s Sis?” asks Bud.

“She’s in the kitchen…”

“Under the sink,” says Bud.

Bud gets up and pulls his hoodie over his head. He’s still dressed in his clothes from the day before. I notice that his bed has been moved away from the window where the cold air comes through the cracks. He’s also covered the window with plastic garbage bags and duct tape. His room is cold enough that I can see my breath. It’s warmer downstairs from the electric heater we keep next to the TV.

Downstairs there is a huge crash, or more like an explosion. Bud and I run to the stairs and look down. The front door is busted wide open. The sheriff is standing just inside the door with a sledge hammer in his hands. We know it’s the sheriff because there’s a badge on his green jacket that says so. There are slivers of wood on the floor.

He looks up the stairs at where we’re standing. “Why didn’t you open the goddamn door?” he yells at us. “And why did you change the locks? You’re not supposed to change the locks without giving a key to the owner.”

Bud and I are standing at the top of the stairs. I feel the cold air blowing in through the front door. How are we going to close that door now?

“Come down here please,” he says.

There is nowhere else for us to go, so I follow Bud down to the bottom stair. Bud does his best to face up to the sheriff who is as big as a bear. His face is red and he’s breathing heavy.

“Where are your parents?” he asks.

“Our mom is out of town,” says Bud, which is true.

“Where is she?”

“She went to visit her sister,” says Bud, which is not true.

“When did she leave?”

Bud and I look at each other. “A couple of days ago,” says Bud. When he lies, his voice goes up just a tiny bit and he lifts his chin. You’d have to know Bud to know when he’s lying.

“’A couple of days,’” he says. “When is she coming back?”

“She’s visiting her sister who is sick,” says Bud. Another lie. It’s true that Mom has a sister, but she married some guy from upstate and then moved to Arizona. That was about 10 years ago. At least that’s what Bud told me.

“When is she coming back?” asks the sheriff.

“She’ll be back any day now,” says Bud. “Her sister is real sick and needs her help to get back on her feet.”

I was home on the day Mom left. It was about three months ago and still pretty early in the morning. She started putting things into her car, suitcases and some milk crates and a laundry basket full of bathroom stuff. I could see that she was in a hurry. She never looked up, so I didn’t get a chance to see her face from the upstairs window. I was the only one who was awake. I usually get up early. Otherwise I just lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. Sis sleeps in the same room as me. Bud has his own room. Anyway, she got in the car and drove away. She didn’t say anything or leave a note. She just drove off.

The sheriff looks around the house and down at the busted door jamb. He doesn’t say anything for a minute and we all just stand there. The wind blowing through the door is making the house colder.

“Is there anyone else here besides you two?” He asks.

“Our sister is here,” says Bud. “She’s probably in the kitchen.”

“Well, go find her and bring her here.”

“You come with me,” he says to me, and we head out the door and stop at the snow-covered walkway that goes to the mailbox. He waves at a white truck that’s parked in the driveway. Three men climb out of the truck, all of them wearing gloves and boots and overalls.

“You boys know what to do,” he says. Then he turns to me and points to the curb and says, “Go make yourself comfortable over there. If you have a warm jacket, then go get it.” Then he heads back over to the porch and staples a yellow paper sign on the door.

Our neighbor from across the street comes out of their house and stands on the porch with his arms crossed on his chest. He just stands there. He’s wearing brown camo hunting gear and a bright orange hat. I go back into the house to get my heavy jacket and my rubber boots and then head back to the front yard.

The three men are carrying our furniture out of the house and putting it on the front yard. Their feet are making tracks in the snow as they walk back and forth. The first thing they bring out is the dining room table and the chairs. Then the couch and the lamp. Then the TV and the table it goes on.

Bud finally comes out with Sis holding onto his hand. She is wrapped up in her pink jacket and wearing her Ugg boots. We just stand there and watch the three men going back into our house and bringing out our stuff. Bud isn’t wearing a jacket. The men carry out my bed and then Bud’s bed and then Sis’s bed. This goes on for about 15 minutes, and then it seems like everything we own is in the yard. Even the milk crates from the basement are stacked up next to the kitchen table. There are colored Christmas lights in the crates and some ornaments.

 One of the movers goes over to the sheriff and speaks quietly so we can’t hear him. The sheriff nods slowly and then the mover goes back into the house.

“You kids have somewhere to go?” asks the sheriff.  “You got family or something like that?”

Bud stands there and says nothing for a minute and then he says, “Yes. We got some people on the other side of town.” I have no idea who he’s talking about, and then I realize he’s lying again.

“Look. You can’t live in a house if you don’t pay the rent,” he says. “It’s against the law to not pay your rent. This here house is owned by someone and if the tenants don’t pay the rent, they have to leave. The owner has bills to pay and they just keep adding up. They have to pay the bank and the bank expects to be paid. That’s the way it is and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

Sis let’s go of Bud’s hand and goes over to sit on her own bed. For some reason, the movers put it back together in the grass. Her hair that she died orange using food coloring left over from Easter is all twisted up in knots, and the cold wind blows it around. She lies down and pulls the covers over her face. Bud goes over and sits down on the bed with her but he says nothing to her.

The sheriff goes back to his car, a white and blue Dodge Charger, and brings us a couple of large plastic garbage bags. He hands them to Bud and tells us to grab whatever it is we need to take with us. “It’s supposed to snow later, and everything will get wet and then it will freeze.”

“Stay here with Sis,” says Bud, and then he goes back into the house. The sheriff answers a phone call, and all I can hear him say is “Yes, of course. Yes, of course. Yes. Of course.” After a few minutes Bud comes back out with both bags full. “I got your clothes in here,” he says to me. “I got Sis’s clothes too.”

Two of the three men seal the door shut by placing a thick steel bar across the front and drilling screws through it into the house and then into the door. One of the men puts the cordless drill down on the railing, and I notice that it’s a DeWalt. The three men stand around on the front porch for a few minutes with their hands in their pockets, and then they come over and the sheriff pays them each in cash. They get into their moving van and back out.

Then the sheriff comes over and looks at me. He doesn’t say anything for a minute and then he lets out a long, white exhale. Bud is sitting on the bed with his elbows on his knees. I can tell he’s thinking hard. I can feel it. The sheriff shoves his hands in his jacket pockets and says, “My hands are tied. There ain’t nothing I can do about this. Nothing.”

Then he turns and walks over to his car, gets in and drives away.

I go over to Sis’s bed and sit down next to Bud.  Everything that was ours that was in the house is all around us. It’s like our house got turned inside out. Our clothes are in two green plastic bags next to the bed. The TV is there on the table.

Even though the sun is coming out, it starts to snow. Light flakes of snow drifting sideways and swirling slowly into our faces and melting.

That’s when Bud says it. He looks at me and says, “We will figure this out.” He says it in a way that sounds like he means it. Like he isn’t lying.

Then Sis pulls back the blanket that’s covering her face and she looks sideways at Bud, like she can’t tell if he is serious or if he’s lost his mind.