I Tried to Evict My Three Tenants, So They Moved Into My Bed novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Three Envelopes
At Sunday supper Marit puts a notice to vacate under each of three plates, signs the sale, tells the three men the real reason, and puts Gunnar's hand on her waist.
On the first Sunday of December I put a notice to vacate under each of three plates, and then I ladled the stew.
The kitchen was warm, and the windows were black with rain.
The table was set for six, as it had been every Sunday for fifty years.
Of those places, only four were for people who ate.
One was for my grandmother, who had died in April.
One was at the corner, for whoever comes home, and nobody had ever sat in it.
Gunnar Ekblad found his notice first, because Gunnar looked under things before he touched them.
He unfolded it and read it standing up.
Then he read it again.
Jussi Virtanen was halfway through a story about a crab pot that walked off his deck.
He was still laughing when he saw the paper beside his bowl.
He stopped laughing.
"What is this?" he said.
"The house is for sale," I said.
"You have until the thirty-first of January to be out."
The third man at the table did not read his.
He folded it along its crease and looked at my mouth.
"It's Ingrid's house," Jussi said.
"It's my house," I said.
"She left it to me, and she left me what she owed on it. Four hundred and twelve thousand dollars, due the last day of January."
"She never said she owed anything," Jussi said.
"She borrowed against it for the roof and the furnace and the nurse who came on the days you were all at sea."
I put the ladle down.
"The lender already gave me one extension. There isn't a second one."
Gunnar set the paper on the table and flattened it with his scarred left hand.
"I'll pay it," he said.
He said it quietly, as a plain fact.
"No," I said.
"Marit."
"No. I won't be bought by a man I want in my bed."
I heard it as it left my mouth.
Nobody moved.
Jussi's spoon rang against his bowl.
Then his hand closed around my wrist, warm and rough.
His thumb lay across my pulse, and it could feel exactly how fast it was going.
"Say that again," Jussi said.
"I'm going to sign the listing now," I said.
I took the agreement out of my back pocket and unfolded it among the bowls.
I clicked the pen and signed my name on the line where the agent had put a yellow flag.
Gunnar's hand came down flat on the page.
"Take it off the table."
"No."
The youngest of them pushed back his chair.
"Henrik," Gunnar said, without turning his head.
"Ingrid's rule."
Henrik stopped with one boot already under him.
Nobody leaves the table until it's said.
My grandmother had made that rule for sailors who came in angry.
The three of them had kept it for eight months after she was gone, with her chair still empty at the head.
Henrik sat down.
His dark eyes did not leave my face.
"Then say it," Gunnar said quietly.
"The whole reason, Marit. The real one. Not the loan."
I looked at the three of them under the yellow kitchen light.
Gunnar, in his gray pilot's sweater, with his broken nose and his big hands flat on the wood.
Jussi, red-bearded and sunburned in December, still holding my wrist.
Henrik, with a pencil behind his ear and sawdust in the cuffs of his shirt.
Every night since April I had lain in my grandmother's bed on the ground floor.
I had listened to them move through the house above me.
I had heard the stairs creak and the water run in the pipes. I had heard a man laughing, a door closing and a man not laughing.
I had wanted all three of them for eight months.
I had not slept with one of them, because that would have been choosing.
The house ran on the three of them not choosing.
"I can't pick," I said.
"I can't pick one of you, and I can't stand to want all of you in a house where I'm the only one who sleeps alone."
"So I'm selling it. That's the real reason."
"Then don't pick," Jussi said.
His voice cracked on it.
"Don't pick, Mari."
Gunnar said nothing.
His hand was still on the signed page, big and still, with the rope scar white across the palm.
I looked at it for a long moment.
Then I lifted it off the paper, and I put it on my waist myself.
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