Page 78 of Damian & Jun, Episodes 9-12
Too soon, Damian needed to leave for work. Richard visited their room to check Damian’s back and reapply cream. Jun stepped out, giving them time together. Émeric greeted him in the hallways. Collin was with him. Jun waited on the couch, texting Mi Hi. She’d stayed in Chicago the last few days, after everything that had gone down with Howser trying to kidnap Betti. No one had been up for looking at the church property over the weekend.
Now that it was Monday though, everyone was more free. Jun had scheduled to go with Collin and two of Richard’s bodyguards to look at the old parsonage on the church property. A general contractor and inspector were going to be on-site to let them know if they could safely inhabit the space. Because they wouldn’t be in public, Jun didn’t plan to try very hard to hide his identity. Mi Hi sent a picture of herself drinking a mug of tea with Dana, Richard’s nine-year-old niece-slash-aunt, behind her waving in the background.
Jun snapped a selfie with his coffee mug and Artemis on his lap and sent it back.
Mi Hi replied with
Damian came out of the bedroom dressed in a pale-blue suit and a dark-navy button-down shirt. He tied it together with a burgundy waistcoat and matching tie. The entire look was ready for a magazine shoot, and Jun would know; he’d done a few of them in his life.
He left Artemis on the couch and stood in front of his man. “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Text me whenever you want about whatever you want.”
Jun’s lips twitched toward a smile. “You want pictures of dirty floors and broken windows?”
Damian’s eyes crinkled up with amusement. “If you’re sending them.” He slid a hand around Jun’s waist, pulling him in for yet another kiss.
Kisses were like water. A necessity. He was going to be dying of thirst before the day was over and they were together again.
Forty minutes later, Collin and Jun got the all clear from their security that Mi Hi was in the garage in the SUV.
The Parsonage, as Jun had dubbed the stand-alone building a stone’s throw from the church sanctuary, was gray with pollution of previous years. The contractor scratched the back of his head as Collin asked about power washing the outside.
“It’ll make it look a lot prettier, for sure, unless you want that drab old look,” the man said. He had a short cut for his uniformly white hair and stood half a head less than Collin and only half a head taller than Mi Hi.
One of the bodyguards, Jun didn’t know either of them personally this time, opened the house door and swept the inside before waving everyone onward. The basic structure check had already been done, so no one was worried about stairs caving in.
The front hall was full of dust. Most of it seemed to be coming from curtains rotting over the door, covering the ornate glass in the front entrance. Mi Hi pulled out a face mask for herself and offered one to Jun. He took it.
There were two front rooms, one on either side of the entryway. The left one looked like it had once been an office. It had pocket doors, only half-open. Jun touched them gently. They still moved, although they needed oiling to run smoothly on their tracks. The opposite room looked like a traditional American living room. There was a decrepit couch and a fully salvageable coffee table. A horrible carpet with what looked like moldy grass lay beneath all of it.
Collin went to the edge of the room and put on a pair of work gloves. He peeled back the carpet.
“Good.” He motioned Jun and Mi Hi over. “The original wood floors are still here. We can pull this out and just repair the wood beneath it.”
Collin had an astonishing number of inexplicable pieces of knowledge in his brain. Jun let him work. Mi Hi followed Collin like a puppy. Jun wandered off on his own. The front hall included the entrance of the front staircase. He climbed the stairs, testing the old banister as he went. There was a solidness beneath the dirt and cheap fixings that remained attractive out of sheer stoicism and distinctiveness.
There was a second floor and a third. More bedrooms than they needed. Either the attic could be a practice space or a lounge. The living room would also work for a practice space. Both had high ceilings. Jun found the back staircase and took it down, coming out in the kitchen. Mi Hi and Collin were there, in deep conversation with the contractor. Collin was down on his knees looking at something inside a cabinet, and Mi Hi was holding a flashlight while the contractor rubbed the back of his head like he was never going to stop.
Jun found the housekeeper’s quarters across from the kitchen. Perhaps Armada would want those rooms. Babies always seemed to need things that required a kitchen. He returned to the front, noting the little points left behind that hinted at a history. Photos on a broken-down shelf of people who looked like they could be Damian’s cousins clustered around a man holding a book with a cross on the front. A paperback with the title To Train Up a Child by Michael Pearl peeking out from the hem of a curtain, as if someone had kicked it out of the way as they left. A baseball bat leaned against the wall of the half-open office. There were photographs in the hallway leading toward the back, a space he hadn’t seen because he’d taken the stairs and traversed the length of the house on the upper level.
Everything had an air of ruin, not something interrupted so much as something that had puttered to a stop and been abandoned as not worth keeping.
Bits of lyrics and melody he had been playing with over the last week solidified in his head. Jun pulled out his phone, flipping to the voice memo function to record himself as he walked through the hall.
Who killed us?
Left us this legacy
Gave us no integrity?
Ain’t got no memory
No history
Just an epistolary
No names, no dates, no place to be
