Re: antique store: sam & julia
She couldn't imagine living without Alex and without Pop. No, Julia didn't want to imagine it and she refused as delicately and forcefully resistant as barbed wire. It was home, as strongly reminiscent now as it was when she locked the memory around her throat like her moms' old locket into a foster home that smelled wrong from the minute she crossed into someone else's cramped hall. Yeah, home wasn't a someplace. It was a something and she believed in somethings existing out there in memory as permanent as a photograph.
"Maybe it's the cold," she suggested now, a curve of a smile that echoed sunshine on street corners on sticky-hot days and youth that could buy popsicles from the bodega with change sneaked from other people's pockets. "It's too cold for fun in Scotland." She hadn't been but she could. If she felt like it she could fly in a private jet, like a bird on a string. It wasn't the same so she never tried. Dreamed big, once. Of Paris on a shoe-string, of Rome.
Julia remembered Joey. Her face folded outward in visible memory. "After your brother," because she heard about that. The letter had been short. No wasted words, just straight to the point in pencil. She could picture a baby Alexander, she saw enough of them, kids crowded one after the other. Blond and blue and cheeky until they got older, until life edged in. Until they got into trouble.
"The way he makes out, he's good as gold." She fiddled with the button of her sleeve, darted a look from the cuff-line to Sam, the slanting half-look of laughter. Yeah, fat chance. Good in jail was not getting caught. Charlie was never going to make education and a white collar job. Lucky if he held down any job but that was fact and she expected it with the calm lack of any kind of expectation it was any way else.
The birdhouse looked like it had taken up space somewhere dusty, somewhere people forgot about birds and whimsy until it had been dug out and installed in the antique-store. Sam stroked its edges, and there was shadow and romance about it. Julia imagined someone who built it, slowly, carefully. For someone who loved birds, who would stroke along the cheery paint and smile. It was a love-letter, or it could have been.
She looked briefly troubled. "Alex is paroled right now, out somewhere. He won't say where," which was better for him. The snare couldn't snatch at him if he stayed out of reach. "Sometimes he'll tell the boys without telling me. Maybe he thinks if I don't know, I can't tell." A half-smile; like she didn't keep secrets carefully as hope. Julia twined a blond strand around her finger, a habit Nick loathed.
"You hooked up with a sheriff? You go to church and shit too now?"