Myla Goldberg by The False Friend

Author:The False Friend
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Psychological, Deception, Contemporary Women, Children - Death, Female Friendship, Family Life, Schoolgirls, Fiction, Literary, Suspense, Memory, Psychological Fiction, New York (State), Children
ISBN: 9780385527217
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2010-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

At dinner, Celia reminded herself that the table’s empty chair was a temporary vacancy, but this did not banish her sense that some sort of non-elective surgery had been performed. The first time she’d brought Huck home, her parents had been so excited to have more than a name over the phone that he could have been a chain-smoker, a man twice her age, or a long-haul trucker and they would have treated him like nobility. Instead he was an aspiring history teacher who laughed at Warren’s jokes, and they had treated him like a son. Even so, it had taken two more Christmases before Noreen stopped asking Celia about her Chicago life and started asking, “How is Huck?” Celia had inherited her mother’s sense of caution. During Huck’s first visit, Celia had been alternately gabby and silent, tense and at ease, until finally on the last night she had burst into tears while they lay together in bed. “You’re still here!” she’d confessed into the warmth of his neck, knowing how ridiculous it sounded and how deep her relief that it was true. Tonight, Warren had turned himself up a notch in compensation for Huck’s absence, his voice striving to fill the void. Noreen had set pitchers of water and iced tea on the table to disguise the place where Huck’s plate should have been.

“Did the two of you talk today?” she asked, as if the mention of Huck’s name might spoil her careful beverage arrangement along the table’s empty side.

“We did,” Celia said. “He sends his love.”

Since the previous morning, mother and daughter had been treating each other like circumstantial seatmates on a long-distance bus ride. It had been years since they had stooped to such depths of courtesy at such close range, not since the protracted sigh that had lasted the four months between Celia’s decision to forgo Cornell and the commencement of her Midwestern migration.

“Is he still coming?” Warren said.

“Warren!” Noreen winced.

Celia squelched the urge to run from the table, mount the stairs, and slam her bedroom door. “Why would you even ask that, Daddy?”

“No reason, I suppose.” He shrugged. “It’s just that I know how busy a teacher can get, and you do look a little down-at-the-mouth. I guess I was just wondering if the two of you—”

“This isn’t about me and Huck, okay?” Celia had mastered an older version of this exchange, complete with hair flips and narrowed eyes. Holding it back felt like strangling a sneeze. “I mean, sure, he’s worried, and he’s got a lot of the same … concerns as you and Mommy do. So I’m trying to help him put some of those to rest, but it’s hard. I mean, everything I’m trying to do … with you, and with Huck, and with people I don’t even know anymore … so if I seem a little down-at-the-mouth …” She took a shaky breath.

“We used to worry,” Noreen said. “In high school, and then for most of college, you never mentioned anybody special.

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