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up, I quickly hopped into the shower to wash the funk of last night off me.
     After getting cleaned, I then made my way to the living room where my Step Daddy Cade was already firmly perched at his usual spot on the couch watching television. He looked dressed for success in a dingy wife-beater and an old pair of ratty boxers and to me; he looked as if he was already half-crocked.
     I watched for a moment unnoticed as his attention appeared intently focused on today’s episode of Maury where newly mothered teens where arguing with their black boyfriends about whether they were the fathers’ of the Mulatto babies whose pictures appeared draped across a screen in the background.
     When I eventually did catch his attention he took one look at me and I then watched as a smirk curled up from around the corners of his mouth right before he had stashed it away behind his bottle of beer, taking a long swig.
     “Late night, I see.” he said sounding unusually jolly. And in that one sententious sentence I knew I’d been busted. There was no point in bullshitting him. He was too smart for that and had been down that road before. Besides, I was sure that the way I must have looked in my enervated hung-over state, I had what I’d been doing last night written all over me.
     “Yeah,” I said in response to his question right before I quickly ducked my head into the refrigerator to see if there was any O.J. left.
     As I searched for the juice the refrigerator’s cool air rapidly encompassed around my aching head and it felt really nice against my flush skin briefly ameliorating my headache. At that moment I had wished I could’ve just stayed in there forever.
     “Don’t worry, kid. Your secrets safe with me,” My step daddy then said to me before letting out a solid burp which he then followed up by lifting his leg so he could scratch his ass.
     “Thanks.” I said cautiously, not knowing if his silence was going to cost me down the road.
     “Don’t mention it.” He responded tipping back his bottle and draining the last of its contents in a series of quick gulps. “I don’t want your mama havin’ anything else to worry about on her plate right now. Things are bad enough as it is with the house bein’ foreclosed on and everythin’.”
     WHAT? I thought as I shot up my head from the refrigerator.
     “What do you mean, with the house bein’ foreclosed on?” I asked quizzically.
     “Yep, your mama didn’t want me tellin’ ya until after she’d come home from work tonight. That way we could break the news to ya together. But, you’re old enough now for us to stop beatin’ around the bush with that sorta thing and just tell ya the truth like an adult.
     “She had gotten a call from the Sheriff’s Office yesterday while she was at work. They told her that the bank had submitted all the proper paperwork needed to begin the foreclosure process on the house, and that we’d have to the end of July to get out.”
     So, that’s why she was crying when she’d come home from work yesterday, I thought.
     “But they can’t do that, can they?” I asked my step daddy pleadingly. But then before he could even open his mouth to say anything I started in again. “Don’t they legally have to give us a chance to pay, or at least a chance to try to set up some sort of payment plan or something?”
     “Just what-in-the-hell do you think a mortgage is?” he snapped back at me with a bite of sarcasm to his tone. “They’re the bank. They own this house. They can do whatever the hell they want. Besides, your mama already tried talkin’ to them about makin’ a payment, and I tried talkin’ to them again earlier this mornin’. But it was no use. They said that the filing process had already begun, and now there was no turnin’ back. The only way we can keep the house is if we pay off the loan