“Yeah, okay, let’s meet at your place then. I can bring snacks if you want.”
“Sounds good. I have plenty of beverages… and chalk.”
After working in the office in the morning, I made a quick stop at the store for something to bring for us to snack on while we worked. Not knowing what Julia liked, I grabbed pretzels, potato chips, Red Vines, trail mix, a couple of Snickers bars, and a giant bag of peanut M&Ms.
She lived in a cute bungalow on a corner lot in what was obviously a family neighborhood. Basketball hoops, swings, and children’s toys were evident at pretty much every house except for Julia’s. Her yard was neatly kept, with a little flower garden running on either side of the front porch.
She opened the door wearing loose gray shorts and a white tank top, the straps of her white bra peeking out at the shoulders. With her hair pulled up in a messy bun and her face clear of her usual make-up she looked adorable in a girl next door kind of way.
“Come on in,” Julia said as she opened the door.
I followed her in, then rolled my lips in as I saw the interior. The living room looked like something out of a movie set in the nineteen seventies. An ancient plaid couch was placed in front of a battered coffee table, two equally ancient tables at either side, both covered in what looked like crocheted doilies. A half dead plant hung from a macrame planter by the window, and there was a velvet ‘painting’ of The Last Supper centered on one wall.
“This is… nice,” I said, remembering my manners.
Julia made a huffing noise as she led me past a heavy dining room set into a kitchen that looked like something out of the nineteen fifties.
“I know it’s dated,” she admitted quietly. “I always tell people that I don’t have the money to remodel or replace the furniture, but the truth is, if I start replacing stuff then that means my grandma is really gone. For now, I like the idea of keeping her here with me. Grandma and I were super close, and I have a lot of happy memories in this house.”
I looked around the space with fresh eyes, imagining a younger version of Julia running around the space playing with her grandmother.
“How long has she been gone?” I asked.
“Just over three years. I re-did the master bedroom when I first moved in, mostly because she died in that room. But then I just kind of… stopped doing anything else.”
Impulsively I patted her forearm. “We all grieve in different ways. There’s nothing wrong with taking time to figure out what you want to do. Besides, just because this stuff is old, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.”
She sent me a grateful look, then looked down at my hand. For some reason, I was still touching her forearm. There was a pleasant little buzzing on my skin where we touched, and I wondered if she felt it too.
Realizing I was being weird touching her like this, I pulled away.
“What would you like to drink?” Julia asked, reciting a list of the beverages she had on hand.
“Just water for now.”
She handed me a bottle and led me down to the basement. It was cooler down here, but fairly light thanks to the windows that ran along the top of the space. We walked past a room that held the laundry, furnace, and water heater and into the finished section of the basement. Thick area rugs covered what looked like ceramic tile. The space was furnished with an ancient orange couch, bean bag chairs, a card table with folding chairs, a pool table, and what looked like a video game from an arcade. Walking over, I was surprised to see it was a retro game.
“You have Frogger? That’s so cool!”
“My mom and dad bought it for my grandpa before he passed. It was his favorite game.”
It was sweet that Julia had such a close relationship with her grandparents. My grandparents on my mother’s side both died when I was in grade school, and my father’s parents had never been around much. Mom told me once that it was because they were mad that my dad had married her instead of the woman they’d picked out for him. I asked my dad about it once and he refused to talk about it. Either way, I’d never met them. I wasn’t even sure if they were still alive.
We pulled the card table and folding chairs in front of the chalkboard wall and got to work mapping out the program plan, the snacks set out on the pool table behind us.
Unfortunately the tentative truce we’d created between us broke down as we discussed some of the finer details of the programs. It was clear that our approach to working with the clients was vastly different, with Julia being way more lenient than I was comfortable with.
“But how will we determine who gets the spots in the programs?” I asked, pointing at the flow chart that Julia and I had just spent an hour hammering out. “It should be merit based, don’t you think?”
“Based on what?” she asked.
“Like if they keep their room at the shelter, do their community chores, and make sure that their kids behave.”
“So if Mom is disabled or the kids have trauma and are acting out, they get punished?” she challenged.
“Well no, but…”
“I don’t like that whole ‘be good and you’ll get the good services’ model. It’s very old school.”
