The False Friend Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother set up your old bed down the hall,” her father offered as they gazed at the room’s foldout couch. “The one in here isn’t exactly the most comfortable thing in the world.”
    The mattress in the Scottish Suite sagged like a swayback horse and creaked at the thought of movement. After Huck’s inaugural visit, Celia had requested a better bed but Noreen had refused: they would upgrade in the event of wedding guests. Celia and Huck had adapted by ravishing one another on the floor beside the sewing table. Though Celia’s mother had long ago knit Huck his own Christmas stocking, the foldout atrocity endured, the last outward symbol of Noreen’s abiding hope for her daughter.
    “Huck will be here this weekend,” Celia said. “It seems silly to switch back and forth.”
    “Huck’s a good man,” her father said, his fingers tapping at her bag’s pull-out handle. “I suppose you talk to him about things … when things happen?”
    “I tell Huck everything.” Celia’s internal clock was confounded by the thought that at this time yesterday she had been in her bedroom in Chicago, waiting for Huck to come home.
    “That’s good.” Warren nodded, backing away. “That’s always been what your mother and I have done.”
    Celia’s father retreated to the hallway. From the neighboring bedroom she heard the creaking bedsprings that announced his daily catnap. More than at any other time, her father looked his age when asleep. Years after the advent of grayhairs and thickening waistlines, Celia continued to be shocked by the progress of her parents’ aging. In dizzying moments of delayed recognition, mental snapshots in her mind’s billfold were rendered obsolete. She would notice the loosening skin along her father’s jaw, the dark pouches beneath his eyes that sleep no longer erased. As her mother buttoned her coat, blue-gray veins would stand out from the collapsing skin of her hands, a trait exclusive to Celia’s sole memory of her grandmother, a seemingly ancient woman who had died at sixty-eight, an age that no longer seemed terribly old.
    Celia returned downstairs to the den, where Noreen filled the leftmost of the matching recliners she and Warren had purchased for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Two decades later, each chair bore the intaglio of its habitual sitter. Celia fit within the contours of her father’s chair like a nesting doll, the imprint in its cushion foretelling the shape of things to come.
    “He feels badly, you know,” her mother said. She was holding her wineglass by its stem, her pinky held out as if she were attending tea. Noreen, always quick to offer wine at dinner, had never invited Celia to join her in the late afternoon. It was one of the sole remaining distinctions between mother and daughter, a boundary preserved by wordless, mutual consent.
    “What does Daddy have to feel bad about?” Celia asked.
    “You know how it is.” Noreen shrugged. “He blames himself even when he shouldn’t.” She sipped her wine. “When your brother started having all that trouble, your father put a lot of stock in the fact that you turned out okay, which is why I’m so grateful that when you called last night, you didn’t go into it all at once. I would have been fine, but for him, I thinkjust hearing Djuna’s name … You were so young when it happened and it wasn’t the sort of thing we were prepared for. Not that any parent is, but we didn’t know what to do.”
    It was quiet with the two of them sitting there and Warren asleep upstairs, the neighborhood inhabiting the afternoon lull that preceded the return of those who hadn’t taken a day off work to meet their errant daughter’s incoming flight.
    “You wouldn’t talk about it,” Noreen said, “wouldn’t even mention her name. Your father got his first peptic ulcer worrying about whether we were doing the right thing. We tried being casual, tried bringing it up at different times of day. We even tried bribing