Alice Sadie Celine: by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright

Author:Sarah Blakley-Cartwright [Blakley-Cartwright, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

For the second time that month, Alice flew north from Los Angeles, her life gathering speed. Alice was portable. Having come from a family of standing and status, an established family, she enjoyed feeling rootless as a cloud.

A soft marine layer blanketed the bay. In this mist, the trees were wisps. Alice’s taxi driver eased up on the gas pedal as they passed over the elevated Central Freeway to the sunny side of the bay, where she and Sadie had vowed one day to live together. They passed the cheerful Star Grocery, which sold asparagus strapped into blue elastic; bright pink irises, still closed; California artichoke; stacks of sun-ripened satsumas.

The taxi stopped at the train crossing and Alice thought of her mother’s friend who had driven across the tracks, trusting the green light and the upraised entry arm. The system had been nonoperational, and she had been slaughtered by the approaching train.

They crossed the tracks. As the taxi drew closer to Celine’s home, the medians grew broader. Walnuts and sycamores gave way to redwood trees, towering over the Mediterranean Revival homes that Sadie faulted for blending too many styles. Alice knew every navigational turn to the trim, compact shingled, topsy-turvy cottage. Fitted with cedar siding, it had an unusually broad face. She knew where the road dipped upward, the houses looming, trees rising into view.

She knew the extra set of keys lived under the sparrow pedestal, in the dry, sloped-front garden, tucked into Celine’s patchwork of Mexican grasses, her eccentric landscaping. Celine was always trying to force things to grow and her plants had a high mortality rate. But those that did survive thrived, budding frenziedly and developing to immense proportions. Sadie said that, like Proust’s housemaid strangling a chicken, she tried to wrestle rewards out of nature. She played god, pretreating bulbs, inverting tubs over rhubarb crowns, cheating with artificial light, blitzing the plant beds with phosphorus and potassium.

Alice bet she’d been the last person to use those keys, visiting with Sadie a few months back while Celine was away at a dreary conference. But today, Alice was not letting herself in.

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