Re: antique store: sam & julia
She'd never been unguarded, Sam's laughter buzzing like heat in a small shop that felt even smaller, like a hug. Even as a little kid. Too many late nights she'd come down in an oversize shirt as a nightgown, knuckling sleep out of her eyes to find the guys from dad's 'work' around the kitchen table and the air thick with it, like smoke. Maybe in the street, racing a boy whose legs would always be longer but not after. Not in the foster home and in the city? In the city, that was the closest to unguarded. She let Nick walk right in. There were benefits to guards and walls and gates.
"Cardigans and tea? They DNA test him?" Jersey was unfolding like wings as the pieces of furled paper-memory unravelled under plaid. She leaned back on worn-sneaker heels and twisted a strand of bramble-bright blond around her finger as she grinned, content with listening to a litany of lost and found and new siblings. And if her heart felt like it had been wrung in hands because there was no cow-loving good news story for Alex, then here was proof you could make it out the other side, happy. She'd believed it, once. Fragile as the blossom on that tea-cup, but it rooted within Julia now, thin but strong.
"You have a kid?" The light faded briefly on Julia's face, blink-and-you'd-miss-it before it winked back as luminous as before. "Sounds busy. It sounds mad, it sounds so good, Sam." It wasn't a romance-novel's worth of happy ending but it sounded happy. Wasn't that better than princes in town-cars?
Charlie. Yeah, sketches probably made more of a difference than letters. Julia didn't know how much school he'd actually taken. It wasn't his kind of plan for the future, and it wasn't Alex's. Her face held onto the memory of sitting across from a table from the boy who was now a man in beige, carved lines where the kid had had the promise of cheekbones, Alexander blue eyes and an attitude, with a guard leaning nearby against a wall, chewing gum that smacked noisily in his cheek.
"He looked like he's done being in," she said. Honest, because she didn't think of saying anything else. It was truth, and truth was comfortable as the worn-in pair of jeans after so much half-truth and what went unsaid for a week. "But he's healthy, hasn't been in solitary much so he's good. I write," she tucked the twined strand of blond back around her ear, her fingers bleached-bone white because she hadn't visited in the last twelve months. Too busy running, which Charlie probably would have gotten, would approve if he'd known.
"Gets out soon, if he doesn't get into shit. He used to tell me when he heard from Alex." Next to Sam, Julia was washed-white and porcelain gold but she looked less substantial than she was. "Tell me about your kid. And your man." Her own finger was bare as bare and she didn't say anything about it.