No Seat for Me at This Table novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Thirty Days

Gianna ends it with Rocco in the hallway and gives notice on the lease. Marco finds the notice on the door.

I went back to the apartment at noon on Monday, when I knew Marco and Carla would both be at work.

Dino came up the four flights behind me with a stack of flattened boxes under his arm.

"You don't have to come in," I said.

"I'm carrying boxes."

"I can carry boxes."

"Then I'll carry them faster."

I almost smiled, and then I put my key in the door.

It opened before I turned it.

Rocco stood in the doorway in gym shorts with a protein shake in his hand.

"Babe," he said. "Thank God. I've been calling you."

He tried to hug me, and I stepped around him into the kitchen.

The room looked wrong without the table.

There were four pale rings in the floorboards where the legs had stood for two years.

"You scared me last night," Rocco said. "You were really out of line, but I get it. You'd had a long shift."

"Eight o'clock," I said. "You told me you'd wait."

"Gia."

"Say it. You started at seven."

He put the shake on the counter.

His face changed, and he dropped the smile.

"Okay. Look. Carla's a kid, and she's been going through a lot with her dad. It was one stupid time."

"Six weeks of nights," I said, and watched his mouth close.

"Who told you that? Dino?"

Dino was standing in the hall door with the boxes, and he didn't say a word.

"Thursday you told me you were at the gym," I said. "Carla posted a coffee that afternoon. It's got your watch on the hand holding the cup."

Rocco looked at the wall for a second.

"That watch could be anybody's."

"It's the one I bought you."

Across the hall, a door opened.

Our neighbor, a retired woman who had left cookies on our mat at Christmas, stood in her slippers and made no effort to look as if she wasn't listening.

I walked out into the hallway so there would be plenty of room.

"Rocco, you're not my boyfriend anymore," I said, loud enough for the stairwell. "I'm done. Your stuff goes in bags by Friday."

"It's my home too!"

"It's my lease."

He stared at me.

He had never once looked at the lease.

I took out my phone and called the landlord's office right there on the landing.

The woman at the desk put me through, and I said it in one breath.

"This is Gianna Ruggiero in 4C. I'm not renewing. I'm giving my thirty days today, and I'm the only name on the lease."

"I'll need that in writing," the landlord said.

"You'll have it in ten minutes."

I hung up.

Rocco was breathing through his nose.

"You're really going to put your own brother on the street."

"My brother had six weeks of Sundays to say something," I said. "Take your bags."

Dino set the boxes down without a sound and held out a pen from his pocket.

I wrote the notice on the back of a delivery menu, dated it and signed it.

Then I taped one copy to our front door at eye level, and walked the other one down to the building office myself.

When I came back up, the neighbor had gone in and shut her door, but I could hear the television turn down.

Packing took forty minutes.

I filled three boxes: my knife roll, my chef's whites, my mother's recipe cards, the good pan, and a frame with a photo of the five of us on move-in day.

I looked at that photo, and then I put it in the box face down.

Dino moved through my room with a roll of tape, and every time he leaned across me to seal a box his forearm brushed my shoulder.

I noticed it each time.

I did not say anything about it.

My closet was almost empty when I saw what was missing.

My mother's grey cardigan, the one with the dropped button, was not on its hook.

I stood and looked at the bare hanger.

It was probably in the wash.

I carried the last box into the kitchen, and at ten to three the front door banged open.

Marco came in with his tie pulled loose and the notice in his fist.

The tape was still stuck to the corner of it.

"What the hell is this?"

"It's a thirty-day notice," I said. "You have until the end of the month."

"Where's the table?"

"At Dino's."

"Gia, Carla doesn't have a place to go. Rocco doesn't. I don't."

"I know."

"You can't throw us out because of one dinner."

"It wasn't one dinner."

He glared at Dino, and Dino met it and said nothing.

Marco turned back to me, and his voice dropped.

"Mom would never have done this to Carla."

"What did Mom ever do for Carla?" I asked.

I had meant it as a real question.

He opened his mouth and shut it, and he looked at the floor where the table used to be.

← Chapter 2 · All chapters · Chapter 4 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend