The Parallel Apartments by Bill Cotter

hidden it back there. It has since been simply overlooked.”
    Charlotte put her Tretorn tennis shoe back on, lit a cigarette, and daintily, consummately Charlotte-like, sipped her beer.
    â€œIs he visiting?” asked Livia as evenly as she was able.
    â€œNot that I am aware of.”
    â€œI assume that’s it?”
    Livia nodded to an old, typewriter-sized wort-green American Tourister covered in greasy dirt and spiderwebs that she’d just noticed sitting in the corner of the living room by Charlotte’s pinochle table.
    â€œThat is it.”
    â€œI don’t remember ever seeing that before.”
    â€œAnd yet there you have it.”
    â€œWhat’s in it?”
    Charlotte finished her beer without a word.
    â€œYou opened a time capsule and the only thing you found of any interest was a tube of expired Alka-Seltzer.”
    â€œA comb. A pair of green platform shoes for a large-footed woman; I imagine they were the property of that friend of Lou’s, Dot.”
    â€œThat’s it?”
    â€œThat is it,” said Charlotte, stubbing out her one-third-smoked cigarette.
    â€œOh, and some old leather books. Two, both the same.”
    For the first time in years, maybe even her entire life, Livia thought she might faint. She sat down. She had forgotten about those diaries.
    â€œHave you read—”
    â€œUnlike most doctors,” said Charlotte, standing up, “Dr. Gonzales sees his patients precisely on time. If one is tardy, one must reschedule, even if one has just swallowed a bottle of ant poison. It is now 2:36, and we must detour around Forty-Fifth due to construction. So. Are you or are you not going to take me?”
    Dartmouth raced into the room and marked the suitcase with a jet of tinkle.
    â€œOkay. Come on.” Livia stood carefully. “No smoking in my Nissan.”
    Charlotte locked the front door on their way out. Livia had lived two doors down from her mother for years but never had she owned her own key. Her mother had never offered and Livia had never asked. This sort of non-exchange was a feature of their relationship (and, in general terms, was a family dynamic—if Mère or Justine were here, they could non-exchange just as expertly), and the longer a non-exchange lasted, the more keen and envenomed it became. The non-nonissue of the key had survived for so long because it was not that important: Livia hardly needed one. Since Charlotte had retired from the bank she never left home. Even before retirement, they had worked roughly the same hours, at the same bank (Livia, collections; Charlotte, teller), so if Livia really did need to go to her mother’s during the workday, she just took the elevator down from the collections offices to the lobby and asked her mother for the key.
    At the moment, though, Livia had never wished so earnestly for her own key. If she had one, the minute Dr. Gonzales called her mother into theexam room, Livia would bolt home and rifle the suitcase, subtracting from it anything that might really, really complicate their lives. Most specifically, those diaries. Dot Disfarmer’s journals, a brace of masty leather-bound octavos filled with illegibly minuscule cursive. Dot, the woman who’d known Lou better than anyone. Dot, in whom Lou had probably confided all his secrets, including the darkest non-exchange the Durant family had known.
    Dr. Gonzales, who was eighty-six years old and had been a doctor since graduating from Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara in 1944, shared his office with two other physicans: Dr. Rosental, a fiftyish neuropsychiatrist who collected sand from the beaches of the world, and Dr. Barney, a pediatrician who had gotten her medical degree at nineteen and still lived with her parents in Westlake.
    Unlike Dr. Rosental’s and Dr. Barney’s shares of the waiting room, which were cheerily carpeted, strewn with invulnerable toys, and furnished with cushiony love seats and