The False Friend (3 page)

Each investigation was an intellectual road trip to a place of previously locked doors, a chance to peer at a new, obscure corner of civic life through a magnifying lens. It felt to Celia a bit like assembling a sand painting grain by grain and then destroying it once the pattern was complete, but the job satisfied her appetite for variety, optimized her long-standing industriousness.
In high school and college, she had signed petitions and organized rallies on faith, unsure she was making a difference, but within a year of her first auditing assignments, the State Assembly had responded to her division’s recommendations, drafting legislation that better aligned state animal drug-testing standards with national practices, and providing funds to improve foster family recruitment and training techniques. It mystified Celia that more people didn’t want to do what she did, and that still fewer were interested in hearing about it—but even that came to feel like an asset. The very words
Performance Auditor
were an excellent cocktail-party litmus test to divine the curious from the incurious, the affable from the petty. Those who didn’t greet her job title with a polite smile and a quick glance over the rest of the room were rewarded with stories of drug surveillance via helicopter during a study of the Police Criminal Investigations Division, or an impromptu embalming-room anatomy lesson during an examination of the Funeral Directors’ Licensing Board. Huck loved these stories, repeating them whenever he got the chance, but Warren’s interest went beyond anecdote. When Celia described to her father Chicago’s tobacco tax distributions, or the varying failure rates from the city’s emissions tests, she felt like she was offering game stats to a rabid baseball fan, a transaction Noreen observed with the detached enjoyment of a zoo visitor at feeding time.

“Jeremy says hello,” Celia’s mother said once the air had cleared. “He and Pam would like to drive down to visit while you’re here.”

“Your brother got promoted,” Warren added. “They made
him a senior adjuster, which is good because they’re going to need the extra money now that Number Two is on the way.”

“Pam is pregnant again?”

Celia’s sister-in-law had been pregnant recently enough that Celia could picture Pam’s face hovering palely above a blue maternity dress, her Christmas dinner napkin lying on her rounded belly like a picnic blanket stranded on an alp.

“Three months as of last week.” From the tone of her mother’s voice Celia could tell she was smiling. “They had wanted two, just maybe not this close together.”

“It’s what you’d call a happy accident,” Warren pronounced, nodding in agreement with himself.

When they arrived at their traditional roadside diner, Celia was unsurprised to find the interior unchanged down to their usual corner booth, though the place was called Jonnie’s now instead of the Treeview and nothing tasted as good—the onion rings no longer homemade, the soup saltier than before.

“When was the last time you saw spring in New York State?” her father asked from behind his hamburger.

“It’s been a while,” she said. The influence of her father’s conviviality was wearing off like a painkiller that stops masking a dull ache. Celia remembered the reason she had come.

“You ought to visit again in September, when the leaves are going crazy,” her father said. “And bring that boyfriend of yours. The poor guy has only ever seen the Southern Tier when it’s frozen over.”

“Warren—”

Warren waved the voice away. “I bet if Huck got a taste of what it can be like here in the fall—”

“Warren—”

“It’s okay, Nor.”

Warren rested his arm along the top of the booth where a taller woman’s shoulders would have been, his shirt sleeve adorning the back of Noreen’s head like a clever hat. In each other’s presence, Celia’s parents became a single organism, a consolidation that had occurred too long ago for Celia to ever undo. From across the table, Celia saw two versions of the same smile.

“We’re awfully glad you’ve come, Cee Cee,” Warren said. “When you start getting older, you begin to appreciate what’s truly important, and you visiting like this … well, it means a lot to us.”

Celia was briefly tempted to confirm her visit as a gift they could congratulate themselves for being given. Instead, she turned toward the window. In winter, the scenery was beautiful in a stark way, the bare skeletons of trees black against the frozen hills. Now it was all green.

“Is there anything special you’d like to do while you’re here?” Noreen coaxed, as if trying to persuade Celia to eat her green beans. “There’s a new restaurant in Oswego we could try, and if the weather’s good I was thinking it might be fun to hike around the lake.”

“Sure, Mom.” Celia tried to keep her voice even. “Look, I’m sorry I was so abrupt on the phone yesterday, but now that I’m here—”

“Oh no, dear,” Noreen interrupted. “We understand perfectly. Phones are terrible for personal conversations. Phones …” She gestured at the tables around them. “…  restaurants. Some
things are much better left to discuss in person, and in private. It’s so important to be comfortable.”

Celia’s parents nodded in spontaneous unison, a pair of bobblehead dolls. Celia’s mouth opened and shut. She had spent the plane ride preparing for this moment. Forcing the words back down felt like dry-swallowing pills. “But you asked what I’d like to do,” she stammered, “and, well, I’m hoping to track down Leanne, Becky, and Josie. Not to mention Mrs. Pearson.” She put her hands in her lap when she realized they were shaking.

Celia’s mother blinked. “You mean Grace Pearson?”

“Who’s Grace Pearson?” Warren asked.

“Grace Pearson is Grace Pearson,” Noreen answered. “Dennis’s wife.”

“You mean the mother of Cee Cee’s little friend—”

“Djuna,” Celia said.

They all looked out the window at once. Spring foliage hedged the parking lot, obscuring the view. There was probably a store or a fenced-in yard just a few feet away, but from the diner it looked like the trees went on forever.

“Why do you want to see Grace Pearson?” Noreen asked in her guidance counselor voice, as if Grace Pearson were a college Celia shouldn’t pin her hopes on.

“To talk to her,” Celia said. “Her, and everyone else who was part of what happened back then.”

Noreen dabbed at an imaginary spot on the table.

“Your mother’s right,” Warren said. “We’ll get back home, you’ll get a little rest, and then when you feel good and ready—”

“But do you know if she even still lives around here?” Celia asked.

Celia’s father scrutinized his plate.

“Dennis left,” Noreen said quietly, “but Grace stayed. I don’t think she wanted … She didn’t like the idea of going too far.”

Eventually, the three of them returned to the car. For the rest of the trip, Noreen remained intent on the passing scenery, her elbow propped on her armrest, her chin cupped in her hands. Celia’s identical pose in the front seat betrayed her as Noreen’s daughter. Had she not so resembled her father, the driver whose jittery fingers picked at the custom-wrapped steering wheel might have been taken for someone hired to ferry his passengers to a place neither wanted to go.

W
hen Jensens were still made in Jensenville and America’s rubber boot capital seemed as firmly rooted as a sycamore, the town built a stone arch carved on both sides with the words
LET IT RAIN
. After the factories had moved south and trains started skipping the local station, the arch remained, spanning the road like a tombstone. Depending on the direction being 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 for
twenty-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 sidestepped
by 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 and
sidewalk with bikes and roller skates, but then returned to whichever more abundant town their parents had chosen, leaving a neighborhood of nostalgic Nanas and PawPaws behind.

With the advent of Medicare and Social Security benefits,
FOR SALE
signs began appearing on front lawns. Aging hips and knees cashed out and traded stairs for single-floor plans in senior communities, or apartments in elevator buildings. In other places such migrations spurred rebirth, but even Jensenville University’s new hires preferred to commute from towns less terminally postindustrial. Family homes were acquired by management companies for student rental, the real estate equivalent of inviting tent caterpillars into trees. Furniture appeared in front yards, and lawns became overgrown. Paint jobs peeled and faded. Three Christmases ago, Celia had returned home to the burnt shell of Randy Blocker’s place, the result of a post-party tryst between a couch and a tenant’s lit blunt. As recently as last December, its blackened carcass had remained half standing, scabbed over with ivy and graffiti. Only now, as Warren turned onto their block, did Celia notice a
FOR SALE
sign finally posted in the middle of the razed lot where, if she remembered correctly, the Blockers’ downstairs bathroom had once been.

“The neighborhood’s looking up,” she almost joked and then didn’t, thinking of the white-noise machine her mother had received last Christmas under the pretense of masking her father’s nonexistent snores at two
A.M
., and not the hoots of drunken students. Celia and Jeremy took turns urging their parents to sell, but Warren was too house-proud to admit that his home improvements had been outpaced by the neighborhood’s decline. When blasting stereos had nullified the pleasures
of outdoor relaxation, he’d had the patio converted into an attached sunroom. Next came a seven-foot-tall privacy fence to shield the new sunroom from the sight of the barbecue pit that had replaced Mrs. Henley’s flower garden. Celia had come to accept that only her father’s death would spur change: her mother wouldn’t want to live in the house without him, and he would never agree to live anywhere else.

“Are you tired, Celie?” Noreen asked the moment they had pulled into the driveway. “I was thinking we could go to the Chinese steakhouse for dinner.”

“Cee Cee doesn’t want to go there,” Warren said. “It’s overpriced and the staff isn’t even Chinese. She’s a Chicago girl! That sort of thing doesn’t impress her.”

“I could always cook,” her mother offered. “I thought it might be nice to celebrate Celie’s arrival, but we could just as easily do that tomorrow or the next day, once she’s had some time to rest.”

“I’m not tired,” Celia said. Not since college had she visited home for more than a three-day weekend, and never without Huck.

“Well then, let’s go out,” Noreen reasoned. “We could go to Maximo’s. Maxi always gets a kick out of seeing Celie, and they’ve still got that great fruit de mer appetizer with the octopus and the squid.”