Page 29 of The Spirit of Love

Chapter Seventeen

“Is this it?” our production driver, Macy, asks, putting the van in park in front of my sister’s house on Monday night.

“This is it. Thank you, Macy!” I call as I carefully climb over our sleeping DP and then Buster, who is deep into a Minecraft game on his iPad.

When I finally make it out from the van’s fifth row back corner seat and grab my backpack from the back, Jude has the passenger window rolled down and is studying Edie’s front yard.

I’d been surprised when Jude and Walter Matthau caught a ride back to LA with the production van, which Rich calls the “Book Mobile.” I know from having once negotiated my own director’s contract that the show would have paid for Jude’s private black car service back to his condo downtown.

I’m even more surprised now, when Jude opens the front door and climbs out.

“Is this your house?” he asks, looking up at Edie’s yellow-door two-story craftsman that sits at the top of a long staircase lined with all varieties of my sister’s plant-babies—passion fruit and tomato vines, citrus trees, and raised beds bursting with rosemary and dill.

Before having kids, Edie had triple the number of edible projects going, but the current state of her front yard feels pleasantly indicative of the current state of her life: a little chaotic, a little neglected, and weedy yet bursting with life.

“I don’t know why,” Jude says, “but I pegged you for a devout west-sider.”

“I am,” I say, surprised that Jude has taken the time to consider which neighborhoods suit me. “I live in Venice. This is my sister’s place. We’re having dinner.”

“Oh. With your nephews, right?”

“Right.” I glance at Macy, at the van packed with cast and crew members, who surely want to get dropped off at their homes, too.

I’m not sure what Jude is doing, starting this conversation here and now, but he’s looking at me like he wants me to say more.

“Frank and Teddy, those are the twin toddlers. And my little baby nephew is Jarvis.”

“So…who’s cooking?” he asks in a leading tone. “I hope someone other than you?”

“Rude, Jude!” Macy calls, but I laugh.

“My brother-in-law is grilling, probably something with under point-five percent fat ratio, so it’s bound to take a while to chew.

But”—I drop my voice because Buster’s headphones may not be fully noise-canceling—“I brought the pièce de résistance.” Stealthily, I give Jude a peek inside my backpack, where I commandeered a sack of peanut M&M’s from craft services and plan to gift them to my nephews for dessert.

“You bribe toddlers to love you?” Jude teases. “Is that what the cool aunts are doing these days?”

“Oh, shut up. They can’t even deal with how much they love me. It has nothing to do with M&M’s.”

He smiles. “Need help with your bags? That’s a big staircase.”

“Bruh,” I say, giving him a squint. “I’ll see you in, like, less than eight hours.

” We have a sunrise shoot tomorrow morning, all the more reason I’m confused that Jude is now out of the van, having this chat.

If I was the one holding up the van, I can imagine a lot of honks and some What the fuck, Fenny?

s from the back rows. But everyone waits patiently for Jude to figure out what he’s after with this conversation.

“Or,” he says, “I could just walk you up. There’s something I wanted to ask you.” He turns back to the van. “Macy, thanks. I’ll get out here. Come on, Walter Matthau,” he says to the dog, passed out in the front passenger footwell.

“You sure?” Macy asks. “Bye, Walter Matthau!”

“Yeah,” Jude says, grabbing his things from the back of the van. “We’ll catch a dog-Uber home.”

We wave as the van chugs away and then Jude and Walter Matthau follow me up Edie’s steps. Walter Matthau gives my sister’s lawn several hundred sniff tests, disappears, and eventually comes bounding out of a rosemary bush, tail wagging and smelling like focaccia.

Jude is quiet, climbing the stairs with his camping gear.

“You okay?” I ask. “You seem nervous.”

“I am. I didn’t plan this out very well. What I was going to say to you.”

“No script?” I meant to sound teasing, but my voice is strained. I realize it’s because I’m bracing myself for bad news. He’s going to say he changed his mind about Buster’s climax scene, and about finding a way to “work together.”

Or worse. Jude could fire me.

We reach the top of the stairs and I turn to face him, readying myself to withstand the blow.

“I was wondering,” Jude starts to say just as Edie’s front door opens and Walter Matthau sprints inside my sister’s house.

“Auntie Fenny got us a puppy!!!!” Frank shrieks at the top of his lungs. I peer inside to see the dog pummeling my nephew with kisses like Frank is his long-lost alpha.

“This is Walter Matthau,” I tell Frank, then Teddy, who comes running out to pummel the dog with kisses of his own. “He’s on loan only for a short visit!” I turn to Jude. “Well, now you have to stay for dinner. Or at least, Walter Matthau does. Sorry.”

Edie appears in the doorway, wearing a towel and a shower cap, Jarvis in her arms. She hugs me tightly. Jarvis coos. “Thank God you survived that awful place.”

Over my shoulder she must have clocked Jude because her body language shifts and she tugs up her towel, as if that’s all that’s needed to make herself presentable. “Who’s this?”

“Um, Edie, Jarv, this is…Jude de Silva.”

“No shit!” Edie says, then clamps a hand over her mouth. “Sorry, I haven’t slept in several years.”

“Jude, this is my sister, Edie. And Jarvis.”

“Hey, Edie, Jarvis,” Jude says warmly, shaking my sister’s hand, then Jarvis’s. “Great house. Great kids.”

“Did you tell him to say that?” Edie asks me, suspicious. I give Jude a wink because he winged it and did good.

“They’re staying for dinner!” Teddy shouts from inside, laughing with Frank as they discover Walter Matthau’s tickle spot behind his ears.

“Come in,” Edie beckons us. “I’ll just throw something on real quick. I can shower when I’m dead.”

We step inside her living room, with its views of the backyard, where my brother-in-law seems to be cursing at the grill.

“He doesn’t know shit about propane,” Edie says under her breath. She turns to Jude. “That’s Todd. Can you help him? He needs help. A lot of help.”

Jude glances at me, then at Walter Matthau, who seems to have a new lease on life. The dog is playing tug-of-war with Teddy, Frank, and a couch pillow.

“Is this okay?” Jude asks me.

“Totally. Good luck with Todd,” I say.

Alone-ish, Edie grips my wrist and tugs me into her bedroom. I bounce Jarvis while she changes.

“What’s going on?” She point in the general direction of the backyard, of Jude.

“I don’t know.”

“I told you crazy shit happens in the desert.”

“One minute, the production van was dropping me off…”

“The next, he’s out there talking to Todd about…” Edie leans in close to the window. “Brazilian soccer teams?”

I shrug.

Edie laughs. “Todd is pretending he knows a single damned think about soccer. Jude does though.”

I look at my sister and then put my own ear close to the window, like a freak.

Through the glass, I hear Jude saying, “My dad’s side of the family lives in Brazil.”

“Did you know he was half-Brazilian?” Edie asks, and I shake my head.

Because someone’s got to say it, I do: “Let’s hope it’s from the waist down.”

I peek through the blinds to glimpse Jude talking to Todd. They seem to have gotten the grill going at least. Smoke plumes around them as they stand, drinking beers, avoiding eye contact, and taking turns poking at the meat.

“Because we’re sisters,” I tell Edie, “I can say weird shit to you and only you, so take this with a grain of salt, but…I feel like I brought over a boyfriend I didn’t know I had.”

Edie, now dressed in a clean sweatshirt and jeans, peeks through the blinds next to me.

“No,” she says. “I already like him way better than any boyfriend you’ve ever had.”

“You barely know him.”

“But I know you, and you seem happy. You seem comfortable.”

“That has nothing to do with him,” I say, but I’m surprised to realize that I am happy.

I am comfortable. I still want my shot at directing, but the anger I felt all last week has dissipated.

I’m in a good mood, and I’m not mad at the fact that Jude is staying for dinner.

I had fun with him last night, and I was feeling a little let down that we sat so far away from each other in the van and couldn’t talk on the ride back.

“So what’s the deal with you two?” Edie says, leading me out of the bedroom and toward the kitchen, where she opens a bottle of wine.

“Nothing!” I say, combing my fingers through Jarvis’s new blond ringlets. “We’re colleagues.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know if it was last night, or if it happened more gradually during the course of the week, but it’s now undeniable: We’re friends.”

Edie looks like I just doused her birthday candles with a bucket of sewer water. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She shakes her head, sips her wine, and stares at the men outside. “You need to take that up a peg because he looks like he gives excellent head.”

“Edie!” I peek around the doorway to see if one of her older children might be near enough to be traumatized, but they’re both on the couch, making a Walter Matthau sandwich.

“It’s the beard,” Edie says. “Kind of a fantasy of mine. That, and a man who can talk dirty in Portuguese? Get out of here with that.”

“It does sound rather hot,” I say, reluctantly looking at Jude and unable now not to imagine such a bedroom scene. I shake my head and cast the thought out the window.

“Signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours,” Edie says. “Help me bring the cheese and crackers outside before the men spontaneously combust from having to speak to someone they don’t already know.”