The False Friend Read Online Free PDF

boxes began appearing in Celia’s lunches, a cardboard carton with a plastic tap became a permanent fixture on the fridge’s right-hand side. Djuna had been the one to observe that sneaking a sip was an undetectable crime. Noreen’s custom was a single glass at dinner, occasionally prefaced by a late afternoon tasting. This sole parental vice attested to a temperate streak Celia thought she had inherited. She had alwaysassumed her brother was made of different stuff. She’d been halfway through college when Jeremy’s grades began to slip. During her brief visits home, when she’d caught glimpses of a silent, glaring teenager with headphones grafted onto his ears, she’d admired her brother’s precocity. Not until she’d been contemplating colleges, toward the end of her own high school career, had it occurred to her to rebel. Jeremy’s ongoing transformation had constituted a regular segment of her parents’ upbeat, long-distance telephone calls. Their cheerful insistence on his normalcy had persisted until the phone rang early one morning during Celia’s junior year. Even when they told her Jeremy was in a coma, it was not until Celia heard the word
overdose
that she realized drugs had been involved all along. Now she wondered if Jeremy’s addiction was a variant of what had possessed her just that once with Djuna in the woods. Their impulses had differed mainly in trajectory. Celia had aimed outward. Her brother had not.
    Warren was halfway up with his daughter’s suitcase, muffled grunts marking his slow progress. Celia dawdled with her coat, waiting until the sounds ceased before joining him upstairs. She had learned about his osteoarthritis last Christmas with her mother’s gift of a bathing suit for lap therapy at the college pool. During her brief visits home, Celia watched for unfamiliar pills at breakfast and scanned medicine cabinets for recent prescriptions in order to restock her own mental formulary of questions. Only once, when Noreen found a lump in her breast, had Celia’s parents ever volunteered medical info. Their preferred method was to wait until asked or until the danger had passed, calling Celia after a trip to the hospital fora cold that had turned into pneumonia, or after chest pains proved to be indigestion—proud each time of having spared her, impervious to the upset their deferments provoked.
    “How’s the knee?” Celia asked.
    Warren shrugged without turning around, making a show of wheeling the suitcase behind him. “It’s different on different days. It’s always worse in cold weather.”
    “It’s not cold today,” Celia said.
    “It’s not so bad today,” he replied. When they reached the guest room he leaned over as if to lift the bag onto the bed, then stopped and left it where it was.
    The bedroom was the smallest of the four. No one remembered how it came to be called the Scottish Suite, only that the tartan wallpaper had preceded their tenancy, the nickname permitting them to treat the room as a sign of family irony and not aesthetic laziness. Noreen had midwifed a bevy of Halloween costumes on the everlasting Singer that now languished in one corner gathering dust. In high school, the room’s wallpaper had come to symbolize all that was intolerable to Celia about living at home: her father’s tuneless humming; her mother’s copious bowls of snack foods; her parents’ joint enthusiasm for whatever moronic interest gripped her brother. At the first sign of guests, she would flee upstairs to make sure the door was shut, one of several small ways she’d attempted to survive her teenage mortification at being someone’s daughter. The first time Celia brought Huck home, she ran halfway up the stairs before turning back around. Pulling Huck aside, she’d described their sleeping arrangements in a grave whisper, as if the Scottish Suite might send him flying back to Chicago.Once upon a time, this sort of thing had constituted a confession.
    “You know, your