Free The False Friend by Myla Goldberg Page B

that held fewer memories, past buildings that had been warehouses during Jensenville’s industrial zenith. One of these brick carcasses now held the town’s two art galleries, divided between photorealism and abstraction, aesthetic streams contained by a single gallery until the couple running it had divorced. Celia had taken Huck there during an initial Christmas visit when she had still felt compelled to keep him entertained. Her early itineraries had provided tours of Jensenville’s failed attempts at reinvention—Antiques Row, Artists’Row, Restoration Row—until, exhausted by the town’s recidivism and no longer so anxious to please, she had reverted to restaurant dinners with her parents and occasional screenings of second-run films she and Huck would never have bothered with in Chicago.
    Eventually Celia reached her neighborhood’s northeastern border. Her parents lived in the southwest corner closer to downtown, but Djuna had been here. Celia wasn’t used to coming at the Pearsons’ from this direction. Perhaps its unfamiliarity was what led her to notice the trees. During her winter visits, their bare branches disguised how much they’d grown since she was a girl. Now she saw foliage once confined to yards overarching the road in a continuous canopy of white blossoms, their petals fluttering to the street like springtime snow. Celia could not help but be impressed: she assumed trees like that had to be at least a century old. In fact, Mr. Jensen’s original chestnuts had perished in a fungal blight in the 1930s. Not until the 1950s had the community association managed to pool its resources to plant flowering pear saplings where the chestnuts had once been. These were the trees that Celia saw now—trees that in ten to fifteen years would reach the end of their natural life spans. In the 1950s, the community board had wanted something economical and fast-growing. Seventy-five years had seemed like a long time. It was an open question whether Celia’s parents or the flowering pears would last longer, but if Warren’s health kept up, it was likely that he and Noreen would witness this final indignity, the arboreal endgame of their neighborhood’s demise.
    An educated guess followed by two corrective turnsbrought Celia from Schiller to Handel, and the steep hill that had represented her favorite part of the bike ride to Djuna’s house. After twenty-one years, all of Celia’s childhood landmarks remained. Here—near the hill’s base at the corner of Handel and Mendelssohn—was the blue curbside mailbox she had fed with envelopes to make it feel wanted. Here, at the midway point, was the SLOW CHILDREN sign she had taken as an insult to her pedaling speed. There, at the top, announcing the beginning of the glorious downhill ride, was the lawn that had been inexpertly replaced by rock mulch. Handel’s hill was trivial to drive but on a single-speed, fixed-gear bicycle, the last few feet demanded a standing pedal. Starting from the ugliest yard in the world, Celia had coasted down Handel’s far side—continuing to stand because it made her feel like Evel Knievel; and, for reasons less clear but equally urgent, singing, “Be … all that you can be, in the Aaaarmy,” the penultimate syllable held for as long as her lungs could make it last. The sensation of the downward plunge—hair trailing like a dark pennant, eyes reduced to slits by the force of the air—had nullified the authority of good sense, debunked the doctrine of mortality. By car, Celia did not allow herself to ignore the stop sign at the base of the hill that, as a young cyclist, she had sped past, rounding the corner onto Wagner and into Djuna’s driveway in a binge of forward momentum.
    Unbridled speed had reinforced the sense of magical transport Celia felt each time she saw the house. The mustard yellow facade with its red and orange trim seemed like a piece of Oz bequeathed to the real world via reverse-cyclone. Mrs. Pearson had