I Couldn't Pay My Three Landlords, So I Gave Them a Baby novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Notice
Ren finds a five-day eviction notice taped to her door, walks into the brothers' kitchen and offers thirty days of herself, and kisses the man who signed it in front of his brothers.
The five-day notice was taped to my door at eye level.
Cas had signed it in the square print I knew from every rent receipt.
Four thousand three hundred and fifty dollars, due Wednesday, or I was out.
I had four hundred and twelve dollars in my wallet and a bus uniform that smelled like diesel.
I had also wanted the man who signed it, and both his brothers, for two years, which was a separate problem.
It was ten to six on a Friday in January, and the hall thermometer said nine degrees.
Under my feet I could hear the three of them in the kitchen.
Every Friday for four years they had eaten breakfast together before work.
Every Friday I had come up the back stairs off my night run in time to hear it.
I peeled the tape off my door slowly so it wouldn't take the paint.
Then I went back down the stairs and into the first-floor kitchen without knocking.
It was yellow and warm and smelled like butter and coffee.
Cas stood at the stove with a pencil behind his ear and his sleeves pushed over forearms scarred white from pipe work.
Rudy sat at the table with a fork in his hand and egg in his beard.
The youngest brother stood at the sink in his fire department blues, home from a twenty-four-hour shift, with a dish towel over one shoulder.
At the head of the table stood the empty chair.
Nobody had sat in Stan's chair since February.
"Renia," Rudy said, and smiled. "You look frozen. Sit. There's eggs."
I crossed the kitchen and laid the notice on the table, on top of his plate.
"I can't pay this," I said.
Cas didn't turn around. "Then you have five days."
"I'm not asking for five days."
He turned.
He had not looked straight at me since his father's funeral.
He did it now from across the kitchen, with a face that gave me nothing.
"I have four hundred and twelve dollars," I said.
"My mother's hospital takes six hundred a month before I buy a coffee. I won't beg you for time."
"Nobody asked you to beg," Rudy said.
"Good. Because I came down here to offer you something else."
The youngest brother put down the dish towel.
"Thirty days," I said. "All three of you. Any night, any room, anything you want, as long as I say yes."
"I start it, and I can stop it. On the thirtieth day I decide whether you get thirty more."
Nobody spoke. The refrigerator hummed.
"Done," Rudy said.
"Rudy," Cas said.
"What? She said all three."
"No," Cas told me. "Go upstairs. Sleep. You've been up all night, you're scared, and you're standing in my father's kitchen."
"I'm not scared."
"You owe me four thousand dollars."
"And I've wanted you for two years," I said. "Both things are true, Cas. Pick the one you like."
His jaw moved.
He crossed the kitchen in three steps and picked the notice up off Rudy's plate to tear it.
I put my hand flat on it first.
His hand came down over mine.
It was huge and rough and so hot from the stove that I felt it in my elbow.
Neither of us moved.
"Take your hand off, Ren," he said quietly.
It was the first time he had ever used the short version of my name.
"Tell me no again," I said. "But say it with your mouth on mine, so I'll believe you."
I slid my hand out from under his and went up on my toes.
He stood completely still.
I kissed him anyway, in front of his brothers, in his dead father's kitchen, with the stove ticking behind him.
His mouth was hard and unmoving.
Then it wasn't.
His hand left the notice and closed in my braid, and he kissed me back so hard my heels came off the floor.
Behind us a chair scraped.
"Well, hell," Rudy said.
The youngest brother, Joey, said nothing at all, but I heard the dish towel hit the linoleum.
Cas lifted his mouth one inch from mine.
"Thirty days," he said, rough, against my lips.
"Starting now," I said.
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