Re: antique store: sam & julia
Jersey was hard to shake. It clung, stubborn as the people who came to the grocery store with a fist of coupons and made the cashier swipe every single one. It stuck, like dirt or the grease from the old car her father kept on fixing up, running on prayer and more of that stubborn unwillingness to let go. It was like a hallmark Julia knew would be on the bottom of the nearest heavy silver, without turning it over. Stamped in, grooved through. Jersey made Julia think of home, the kind with an oilcloth on the kitchen table and full of old rock hits from the radio.
Six seconds. She looked at Sam and Sam looked at her and Julia entirely expected to be known in that moment. It was the kind of confidence that came along with the streaks of grease on the insides of her wrist, the laughter from standing in the street bent double with her hands on her knees from trying to keep up with Charlie and failing until the breath stabbed in the space between her ribs.
She was hugged, a wave of warmth and pressure and the snarl of silky blond crammed up against her shoulder and she hugged back without a spare second's hesitation. There was Alexander blue in Sam's face and the smile when Julia pulled back was wide, wide open in exchange for memory of the boy-man who wrote letters on cheap paper that arrived in the mail to a P.O. Box Nick didn't see. The Alexanders were fringe-family, warm memory like candle-light.
"Yeah, yeah. I heard about it. The Jersey invasion. I heard you got a Scot in the family, a serious one," it was hard to put down on paper how you felt, what you saw, the stretch of family outside that were photographs and stories instead of people you could hold. Julia didn't think: Alex and Charlie were the same in a moment and Sam's face blurred and she hugged her once more, tight and quick and decided.
"You're so grown up." Julia's voice held marvel like a kid with a lightning-bug cupped in sticky hands, she pulled back and she pushed a handful of blond out of her own eyes to look. "Last I remember you were all gap and knees and elbows. You look like him." She smiled, the kind that felt like a light on the inside reaching out. "I visited."