The Parallel Apartments Read Online Free PDF Page A

grandfather.
    Justine shook her head, shedding the memory like a wet dog twists to dry. Justine turned around.
    The homeless woman looked like a witch in a German fable. The witch’s hand emerged from a narrow opening in the stained canvas poncho, holding a thick stack of napkins.
    â€œThank you,” said Justine, taking the offering. It seemed that the witch took advantage of proximity to brush Justine’s hand with her own. It was limp, damp, and permanently soiled, like a root. She stared carefully at Justine through large, red-framed glasses that might as well have come right off of Sally Jessy Raphael’s face. Her teeth shone, white and even—not something often seen among the homeless. Her nose was turned up, red and round, like a little Christmas bulb.
    The witch leaned forward and stared into Justine’s eyes with the curiosity and investment of an ocular surgeon. Then the witch jumped, turned away, and threw her head back with enough force to flip her long, ashen braids against her back.
    â€œOh Christ, the green there,” she said to the ceiling.
    The afternoon’s lone employee, Meenakshi, paid as much attention to this outburst as she had ever paid to Justine’s concussive bawls; viz. , little. This Dunkin’ Donuts might as well have been the world’s Parnassus for the public-outburst-prone.
    The witch whipped back around, sending the braids into brief orbits.
    â€œHole?” Her doughnut carton emerged from the same opening the napkins had come from. There were seven left, all plain.
    â€œThat’s okay.”
    â€œWhy are you crying?”
    â€œI’m… tired.”
    â€œHow long have you been tired in New York?”
    The witch stared, smiling, beseeching. Perfect white squares. Oh: dentures.
    â€œSince, well, I guess 1988.”
    â€œOh, poor thing, you came right to New York after you left, didn’t you?”
    Bullwhip hair. Watery, malarial eyes.
    â€œUh, do you live here?” said Justine, only subconsciously apprehending the witch’s remark. “In New Y—”
    â€œAre you married now?” said the witch, putting her doughnut house on the counter next to Justine’s ice coffee, and throwing the wings of her poncho over her shoulders like a magician. Or a superhero. Or a vampire.She sat down on a pink stool, put her elbows on the counter, then rested her enormous head in one of her roots.
    Justine looked over at Meenakshi, who was leaning over the sink trying to bite off a piece of powdered-sugar doughnut without dusting her lipstick, a magnetic sienna Justine committed to memory in order to reproduce in magazine parings an abstract collage that would hopefully guide Justine into deciding what to do with this pregnancy. Abort the fetus now, or allow it to self-destruct after delivery, be it three days or seventeen years? Do it now, said the sword-wielding Justine; Just let it do it to itself, said the opposing Justine, crouched behind a poison sumac with her thumbs jammed into her ears. Justine sighed with such hot volume that condensation formed on the lid of her coffee.
    â€œSo,” said the witch, like she was Justine’s best friend, greedily begging for the sopping details of a one-night stand. “What’s he like? Are you happy? Does he tell you how wonderful you are every day? Children?”
    She reached out and touched Justine’s hair, which was slick and matted from the sweat she invariably squeezed out of the pores along her hairline whenever she cried hard.
    â€œYou should have him brush your hair,” the witch continued. “Prestige Mélange, I love that brand, it’s good to cry now and then, you cry a lot, I’ve seen you cry, I know your cry, I’ve known it.”
    Justine stared back.
    â€œI worry, you know,” continued the witch. “Oh, daily, I think, What have I done? Why did I? I have no excuse, I offer none, I blamed him, but I did it; I didn’t