The False Friend Read Online Free Page A

traveled, the inscription served as augury or epitaph. Leaving for college, Celia screamed those words loud enough to wind herself, and almost crashed into a stalled Ford Pinto. Each homecoming forced a new surrender.
    Djuna appeared at the edge of Celia’s vision as soon as Warren’s car cleared the arch’s shadow. As if to compensate fortwenty-one years of banishment, there she was dancing by the corner drugstore waiting for the light to change; and there, in front of the post office where she had once fallen off her bike. Celia spotted Djuna striking poses before the defunct hobby shop, and a block later lounging on the bench beside the former stationery store. Trudy’s Card and Gift had been turned into a combination head shop and skateboard outlet called Skate and Bake. Seasonal window displays of hearts, Easter eggs, shamrocks, and turkeys had been replaced by a handwritten sign— SMOKEING EQUIPMENT MEANT FOR TOBACCO ONLY —that spelled its own imminent demise. Celia was reminded of another window, papered with sun-faded albums and a sign that read VISIONS IN VINYL . The place had stunk of cat piss and mildew. Even breathing through her mouth, Celia had barely tolerated standing inside the store while Djuna flitted down its aisles, trying to flirt with men intent on rummaging through the used-record bins. That shop front had long ago been painted pink and rechristened ELECTROLYSIS BY ELYCE .
    Djuna had disappeared by the time Celia reached the boarded-up dry cleaners at Elm and Main, its hazmat signs unchanged since the Reagan era. The prevailing high school wisdom had kids in search of a cheap buzz invading its basement to inhale fumes thrown off by moldering vats of solvent. Had Celia been around to witness her brother’s high school years, she might have known if it was true. Beyond the dry cleaners, the streets bore the stamp of Jensenville’s founding German émigrés. The best proof of their successful assimilation was the local pronunciation of “Beth-o-ven” and “Go-ee-thee” streets. Such phonetic butchery had been sidesteppedby Schubert, an asset Warren and Noreen had considered along with their home’s southern exposure and restored front porch before signing on the dotted line. Built before the cookie-cutter era of planned communities, the neighborhood’s diverse arrangements of porches, pitched roofs, and dormer windows had been realized by an early twentieth-century abundance of materials and labor. Celia grew up taking such charms for granted, along with the bounty of school-aged children. Those not in public school had attended the Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose adjoining church had tolled the hours from nine to six, as well as the daily masses. Celia had learned to count by tallying the call to worship to its thirty-ninth ring, but the number remained a mystery until Randy Blocker, a Heart of Mary boy two doors down, had described the special fervency of Immaculate Heart’s pastor for the number of lashes Christ received, extinguishing Celia’s envy of plaid uniforms.
    Since Celia’s Midwestern migration, the pastor had retired and the church bells had fallen into disrepair, their stillness ringing in an age of stagnation. As children left for college, sluggish property values delayed the move that commonly cushioned the transition to retirement, creating a neighborhood of empty nests and muted seasons. The jingle of ice cream trucks stopped marking the arrival of spring. The lifeguard’s whistle took on purely ceremonial functions as adult and all-swim merged. Successive Halloweens passed with fewer and fewer trick-or-treaters, until Warren and Noreen no longer even bothered with a token bowl of candy. On weekends, or for brief stretches during school holidays and summer vacations, grandchildren sporadically revived small patches of neighborhood lawn andsidewalk with bikes and roller skates, but then returned to whichever more abundant town their parents had chosen, leaving a