Free Duplicate Keys by Jane Smiley

will.”
    “What is it?”
    “It’s all boxed up and ready to go,”
    “Good, Daddo, what is it?”
    “A microwave oven. Radarange. It got to the store with a couple of big scratches in the finish, so rather than sending it back to the factory, I just thought I’d send it to you. Now look, honey, you just set it on the counter and plug it in.”
    “Thanks, sweetie.”
    “Sure. Say, have you seen this show called
Ain’t Misbehavin’?”
    “No, but some friends of mine have tickets.”
    “I bought the records. Pretty good.”
    “Daddy, come to New York. We’ll go see it.” Guaranteed to get him off the phone. In a moment, she said to her mother, “Don’t let him send it. I’ll have to pick it up at the post office in a cab. It’ll be a mess.”
    “I tried to tell him that, but the ball’s rolling. Can you give it to some daycare center, or something?”
    “I don’t know any daycare centers. I’ll ask the police what to do with it.” But Doreen didn’t perk up, didn’t wonder what Alice might have to do with the police. The police in Rochester would know what to do with it, and have time to do it. Alice sighed. After talking for a moment about the new strawberry bed, a kind of earthen ziggurat in the middle of the garden, Alice hung up, unable to tell them after all.
    She went into the living room. She was terribly ready for bed, but somehow afraid to go. It was better to stay near the still-warm phone, imagining her parents in Rochester. Her mother would have turned on “Masterpiece Theatre,” and her father would have stuck his hands in his pockets and gone out to inspect the new ziggurat yet again. After “Masterpiece Theatre,” Doreen would call her mother to say that she would call in the morning, then Alice’s father would go through the house, locking doors and windows, buzzing the smoke alarms, sniffing all around the gas stove, turning down the heat if the day had been chilly. Then he,too, would go to bed, and sleep would come to them at once, and stay with them hour after hour. They were excellent sleepers. Alice stood again by the window, wondering if any relative of hers ever had insomnia. Was sleep the clue to their longevity? She sat down on the couch and rested her chin on the arm, gazing idly down Eighty-fourth Street toward West End. She almost never sat in the living room. The couch, a convertible, did not wear its machinery very comfortably, but still, from one window or another, she had probably gazed pensively down Eighty-fourth Street a hundred thousand times in the last five years.
    A figure came down the other side of the street, and she recognized it as it stepped into the light of the building across the way as the man she’d shared the cab with the other day, last night? Henry. Henry Mullet. He pulled open the big door, reached with his key to the inner door, and disappeared. Alice imagined him crossing to the elevator, pressing a button, getting into the elevator, pressing another button, rising slowly in the shaft, getting out, crossing to his own door, fumbling with his keys, unlocking two, maybe three locks. Sure enough, the light went on in a window one floor above hers, and then in the window next to that one and the one next to that. After a moment, in the middle window of the blazing apartment, Henry Mullet himself appeared, with a beer, yawning. He looked out at Eighty-fourth Street, too, out at her in her dark window. He was handsome. Had she noticed that the night before? He unbuttoned his shirt and took it off, revealing a ribbed sleeveless undershirt. Alice wondered if he had ever seen her unconsciously naked, scooting down the hallway, secure in being alone. He drained the can of beer and, turning, threw it toward some invisible wastebasket. Alice reached for the overhead light, pulled the string, waved vigorously at Henry Mullet, who waved back, then pulled the string again. Henry Mullet laughed and turned away from the window. She could see the moldings