Duplicate Keys by Jane Smiley

include Noah Mast and his dog, Fred, both already graduates, since Fred accompanied Noah to classes and even into restaurants. When Fred was hit by a car, the whole group mourned, and when Rya came along, the whole group groaned, but eventually expanded to include her, like any family with marriageable children. When Jim ran off with Mariana, he lost all his friends as well as his wife, and Alice sometimes wondered if that might not have been his hidden purpose all along. He called them on Christmas and said everything was just great, like a dutiful prodigal son, but they only heard third or fourth hand about the stillbirth of Mariana’s baby. Alice looked out the window to where the woman in the bonnet was tramping down her flower bed—
Impatiens
—and began again to panic. How was it that they had jogged along from day to day, from dinner to dinner and gig to gig and apartment to apartment never comprehending the dangers around them? Why did Denny hand out keys to his apartment, why did Craig sleep with Rya and sample speed and heroin on the Coast, why did Ray flirt with wielders of knives, how did ten thousand dollars become so debased a sum that Craig and Denny didn’t even worry about owing it, and how was it that this life seemed still continuous with the rest of their lives, and the lives of their mothers and fathers on the slow, spacious northern plains? Even Craig spoke of the death of his parents as a strange anomaly, not a symptom of some evil reality. Yes, they died, but numerous aunts, uncles, and friends flowed into the breach, and that kindly, God-loving and Godfearing, happily populous family, the Mineharts, enveloped him, adored him, admired his edgy difference from themselves. “Oh, that Craig!” was what Mrs. Minehart said ten times a day when Alice spent the weekend there once. It was as if they had rolled into Minneapolis and then into New York without ever losing the sublime Midwestern confidence that if you left the doors unlocked while you slept, the neighbors down the road mightstop by and drop off the tools you needed to borrow. If they had grown up in New York, would they have been more wary of the dangers or more tempted by them? The drop from the middle class that was a little slope in Rochester was a precipice in New York City. How had they not known that? Unlike some of the others, Alice had never spoken contemptuously of the middle class. A job, an apartment, a washing machine, some money to spend, these were goods, not evils.
    Alice stood up and stretched, thinking of her job, her apartment, her washing machine, her spending money. Of course they were secure, of course they were. Ray and Susan and Noah and Rya and all the rest of them had no claim on her tight little life. Whatever the police did or Ray’s friends did, the library would go on, employing her to catalogue and do reference. But as she thought of them one by one she loved them one by one, yearned to embrace them, to take each on into her tight little life and divvy up the library proceeds, share out the rooms, feed and embrace and reassure. Briefly she fantasized some fending off of the police with weapons, but then she looked down on Eighty-fourth Street, at people walking around, going in and out of apartment buildings, people she had seen so often in the last five years that she almost knew them; wanting to stay a part of that bustle, too, she did not know what to think. That was her usual frame of mind now, not knowing what to think. She picked up the phone jack, flipped it a few times with her index finger, then plugged it in. It rang at once.
    P AUSING outside the police station on Eighty-second Street, Susan ran her hands down the front of her dress and said, “How do I look?”
    “Respectable. Neat. Tired.”
    “Still?”
    “Aren’t you?”
    “Beat.”
    “Don’t worry. You might even like him.”
    “I might.”
    “He ought to love you.” Alice kissed Susan on the cheek for confidence and followed her into