Re: antique store: sam & julia
Julia had never minded cold. It was just the way it was, you could stand outside in your pops' old coat and your brother's flannel shirt and stolen socks from either of them and watch them both trying and failing to fix an engine. Cold wasn't heat sticky-thick lying on top of your chest in the middle of the night, it was keen and it was quick and if you went hungry on the way to school, it was like the senses tangled together until you didn't know if you were hungry or cold or both or neither. Now there was condensed air piped through the townhouse. Cold was something you ducked into heated cars to hide from, or avoided entirely. Yeah, Julia liked the cold even shrouded in layers and layers and with her fingers welted up into her sleeves.
"It's the middle of nowhere," she said, city-kid to city-kid. Nowhere, where people noticed when their neighbors didn't pick up their mail or didn't hit up the grocery store for bananas and bread. The city felt like spines; Julia didn't mind the nowhere either. Scotland or Repose. The middle of nowhere was good and dead but living underneath it, mapped out like green buried underneath snow.
"From what you say, the way to get him out is to hold a tea-party or something." Almost something, brimming on the verge of honest and well-intentioned, humor tucked into her cheek. She'd learned it in the system, when you got belted for mouthing off. It felt like daring, like obscenity.
"Alex is the same." Alexanders or just kids who had eyes open to the way the world worked. There was no point in saying anything about how shitty life could get just by walking through it. And Julia was. Practicality was blood and bone. Whimsy was extra. It was like cream stirred into coffee, enough to take the bitterness out and bitterness was like giving in. "He has his shit going on. I wouldn't mind secrets if he told me anything." A slant of shoulder, the kind that said 'I worry' at the same time as it said 'but no one gives a shit if I do'. City kids.
"A serious improvement on the last guy. VICE, sheriff, hot and not a total ass." Charlie didn't have a lot to say about the guys his sisters saw. When he did, it was read-between-the-lines stuff. "You look happy. You're happy, right? Even with the birdhouse and the sister who checked out." Julia's concern was on the surface but it ran clear and serious and deep.