The Opposite Of Tidy (14 page)

As Junie peed, she realized that Royce and Jeremy were gay, of course. What an odd couple.

After she washed her hands, she opened the door to find the dog sitting there, staring at her, growling again.

“Good girl, Lucy,” Junie murmured, looking down the hall to see if Jeremy was there to call her off. The front door was open. Beyond it, she could see all three of them bending over the back of the van where the engine was. Junie held out a hand, hoping to make friends with the enormous dog. Lucy growled louder, baring her teeth. “Help?” Junie said quietly. She took a step to move past the dog, but Lucy stood, and up went the hackles again.

“Okay. I get it.” Junie backed up, and sat on the edge of the bathtub. Lucy didn’t budge, until quite a while later, when Junie heard footsteps, and then Jeremy’s voice.

“You caught me a girl? Good dog, Lucy.” And then, “It’s okay. I got her.”

“Thanks,” Junie said. Although she wasn’t sure she should be thanking Jeremy. He shouldn’t have had such a vicious dog.

“She’s a good guard dog,” Jeremy said. “We like it like that.”

“She
is
a good guard dog.” Junie pointed to the front door. “Will she let me go now?”

“Sure.” Jeremy stepped aside and kept a hand on Lucy’s collar as she passed. “They’re trying to get the van fixed. She’s got a lot going on under the hood.”

Junie didn’t bother to remind him again that it was a male van.

Not even twenty minutes later, the van started, and sounded even better than it had before.

Royce wiped his hands on a rag and smiled proudly. “Never met a microbus who didn’t like me.” He closed the engine hood and grabbed the cane that had been resting against the van. “Now, can I invite you two in for a beverage before you get back on the road? Seeing as how Jeremy here hasn’t exactly been the best of hosts. Not his forte.”

Jeremy shrugged. Lucy sat at his side, her tongue lolling out. With a canine sigh, she rolled her shoulders back in what looked very much like a shrug too.

“What do you say, Junie? Should we get going?” Wade looked at her, and she could tell by his expression that he was letting her decide if they’d stay or go. She had no idea what he’d had in mind to do after they’d done the “quick” errand of picking up the movie. All she knew was that, as weird as the afternoon had been so far, she didn’t want it to end.

“Sure, we can stay.” Junie looked at her watch. “For a while. I turn into a pumpkin at nine, though.”

Royce looked at his watch, and Wade checked his cell. “I’ll call my brother and tell him we don’t need a ride. Thanks so much, sir. We’ve got about an hour before we should start heading back.”

“Exactly enough time for soup and biscuits,” Royce said. “And please, call me Royce. And don’t call Jeremy ‘sir,’ either. Neither of us have been knighted by the Queen. Yet.”

The sun had slipped behind the hill on the far side of the river, and any warmth had gone with it. Soup would be perfect. And Junie was hungry, she realized. She had hardly eaten lunch, she’d been so nervous about the date.

“If you want to shoot your movie or what have you,” Jeremy mumbled, “go ahead.”

“Thank you, sir. I mean, Jeremy.” Wade winked at Junie as the two men went back inside, Lucy following them. He grabbed the camera from the van and set her in his sights. “I need some footage for my English term project and I’ve just had the best idea. Want to be a star, Junie?”

Junie did a little curtsey. “Sure. Why not?”

He filmed her walking from the porch, around back, along the lopsided barn wall and down to the river. She picked up rocks along the way, as per his direction, and put them into her sweater pockets.

“Like Virginia Woolf,” he explained, telling her that that was how she’d committed suicide, by loading herself down with rocks and then walking into the river.

“I’m not walking into the river,” Junie said. “It’s bad enough that the rocks are stretching my sweater.”

“Not today. But before it’s due? For the sake of art,” Wade said. “And an A in English.”

It was growing dark as they made their way back to the house and knocked on the front door. Lucy barked on the other side, only settling when Jeremy let them in.

“In the kitchen,” he said, and then headed there himself.

Royce was standing at the oven, his cane leaning on the counter beside him. He slipped his hands into a pair of oven mitts before removing a tray of hot biscuits from the oven.

“Sit,” he said as he brought the tray to a small table under a window overlooking the river, almost black in the dusk. “I have borscht, with sour cream to put on top. And great big slabs of butter and chunks of nice sharp cheese for the biscuits. Heavenly, if I do say so myself.”

Not surprisingly, Jeremy didn’t say much while they ate, leaving all the talking to Royce, who was obviously the more social of the two. Over dinner, he told them how he and Jeremy had met back in the ’60s when Jeremy had come to London to intern at the movie studio where Royce had already worked on three of Stanley Kubrick’s movies, as a production assistant at first, and then as assistant director.

“Jeremy was a scenic artist. Doing the sets.” He pointed to an arrangement of framed art hanging on the wall above the table. “He did those, too. A very talented man indeed, my Jeremy.”

“It’s an honour to meet you guys,” Wade said. “Honestly. I have a million questions.”

“Ask away. And if not today, then you’re welcome to
come back.” Royce coughed, and then struggled to catch his breath. “Anytime. Really. I love company.”

“You want your oxygen?” Jeremy grumbled, his mouth full of biscuit.

“No, ta.” Royce sat back, a hand on his chest. “I’m good.”

Junie studied the men’s faces while Jeremy scrutinized Royce, clearly not believing him. She was curious about them both, and the life they lived there at the edge of the river, in such an unlikely little town. She would like to come back, she thought. And if Wade’s awed expression was anything to go by, he was thinking the same thing.

Jeremy got up from the table and came back with a bottle of wine. “Helps with the breathing, sometimes,” he said by way of explanation.

Royce smiled as Jeremy poured him a glass of the crimson liquid. “Especially if it’s a good vintage.”

Without asking, Jeremy got two more wine glasses, filled them a quarter full and set one each in front of Wade and Junie.

“Jeremy,” Royce scolded, “they’re children.”

“Old enough to drive,” Jeremy said as he filled his own glass nearly to the brim. “Old enough to drink responsibly. I only gave them a wee bit. No harm.”

“And I won’t even finish it, but thank you.” Wade raised his glass, readying for a toast. Junie marvelled at his ease, at his smooth ability to go along with whatever came at him. If it was possible, he was even more attractive to her now than he had been just hours earlier. “To Jeremy, and Royce. And Lucy—” Here he bobbed his glass in her
direction, where she lay on a dog bed by the back door. “Thank you for your hospitality and mad skills with a wrench. Cheers.” They all clinked glasses.

“
Slainte
!” Royce said and took a swig. Jeremy took a sip too, and so did Wade.

Junie brought the glass to her lips and took the tiniest of sips. She’d tried red wine before, but hadn’t liked it. She fully expected not to like it now, either. But maybe it was the kind of wine, or the day in general, but it was lovely. Tasted like smoked cherries, and warmed her throat as it went down.

“Cheers!” she said. Her cheeks felt warm. And her belly full with the fragrant soup and warm biscuits. She grinned. She couldn’t help it. This Very First Date had been nothing like she’d expected. And yet it had been perfect. Absolutely perfect.

TEN

It was dark by the time they left, the lights streaking by at the highway exits as they drove back to the city. Junie and Wade talked about Jeremy and Royce almost all the way home. Sharing their assumptions that they were gay, trying to figure out how they’d got from London to Chilliwack, what made Royce so frail. Wade, the child of doctors, suggested congestive heart failure, while Junie placed her bet on AIDS. Then it seemed suddenly very sad to be discussing his health so lightly, and Junie said so, so they changed the subject. Wade talked about his English term project due at the end of the school year, a short biopic of Virginia Woolf.

“You’re my muse now,” he said as they pulled off the highway, back in the city. “I didn’t even know that I was looking for one until today. But you’re it. Definitely.”

Junie didn’t know what to say. She loved the idea of
being his muse but was too shy to say so. “But I don’t look anything like Virginia Woolf,” she said instead, thinking of the poster in her English classroom, the dour-looking woman with the horsey face and plain hair.

“No, you’re far, far more beautiful than she was.”

Junie leaned forward and gasped silently, the wind knocked out of her by what he’d just said. She was thankful for the dark covering her reaction.

“You are,” Wade continued, a hint of nerves in his voice now. “She was gangly and plain, with those buggy, uneven eyes.”

But Junie was gangly and plain too. Although her eyes were just fine. Still, she couldn’t think of anything to say. Not one thing.

Sensing her unease, Wade babbled on, getting more and more nervous himself, judging by how fast he was talking, and how much.

“She was mentally ill. Definitely. A genius. But tortured. Did you know that on the day she died she wrote a note to her husband, and one to her sister, too? Her sister’s name was Vanessa. I was thinking I could use Tabitha as Vanessa, if you think she’d go along with it. They were really close. Vanessa and Virginia, I mean. I don’t know why I want to do Virginia Woolf. I mean, she’s on the list that Mrs. Hooper put up of writers we could choose, but I totally thought I was going to do Jack Kerouac. You know,
On The Road
. Which has got to be one of the best books ever.”

Junie knew she should try to say something, if only to knock him out of his nervous babbling. She opened her mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

“All I know about Virginia Woolf is that she killed herself.” That would do. And it did. Wade shut up. “But I didn’t even know how until you told me.”

“So you’ll do it?” Wade turned to her in the dark. They passed a streetlight. Then another. She could see him grinning at her. “You’ll be my Virginia Woolf?”

“Wade,” Junie said, quite seriously amazed at herself, “I’d pretty much be your anything.”

Silence.

Junie’s gut churned with regret.

Seconds dragged themselves by, like war casualties. They came to a red light. Wade slowed the van to a stop. It was a bright intersection, not far from their school. Junie was afraid to look at him. She’d blown it. Too much. Too soon.

But then Wade reached for her hand, took it gently in his and turned it over. He kissed it. A sweet, slow kiss on the palm of her hand, which seemed so much more intimate than if he’d kissed her anywhere else, even her lips. That one kiss set off a cascade of delicious shocks that zinged up her arm and radiated through her whole body.

“Perfect,” Wade said. “Perfect.”

As far as Very First Dates go, Junie couldn’t think how it could have been any better. It had been perfect. Absolutely perfect.