Everything in the Hamper
Episode 3 of 3 of The Two O’Clock Wash by Nora Feld
Three weeks.
I want to be honest about those three weeks, because I told myself a number of things during them and most of them were not true. I told myself it was none of my business. I told myself people get through grief on their own schedule and that showing up is not a debt. I told myself I was a woman who worked nights specifically so that she would not have to hold anybody’s anything, and that the entire appeal of the job was that everyone who walked through the door walked back out of it.
I told myself all that, and then every Tuesday at two in the morning I looked at the door.
Dana asked about it once, on a handover.
“Green bag guy stopped coming.”
“Did he.”
“You’d know,” she said, and let it go, which is the best thing about Dana.
He came back on a Tuesday in April.
He looked bad. Thinner in the face, and he’d cut his hair himself or let somebody do it who shouldn’t have. The bag was over his shoulder.
“You’re back,” I said.
“I’m back.”
He stood in the middle of the floor. He didn’t go to the chairs.
“I got as far as the parking lot,” he said. “That night. I sat out there until four and then I drove home.” He shifted the strap. “I couldn’t tell you. I didn’t know how to come in and tell you I couldn’t.”
“You could have just come in.”
“I know that now.”
“Three weeks, Tom.”
“I know.”
He walked past me to the machines and put the bag down on the folding table, and his hands were not steady, and I have never in my life wanted so badly to do something for somebody that they had to do themselves.
He opened it. He took things out one at a time and did not look at them: a grey sweatshirt, two pairs of running socks, a blue shirt with a coffee stain on the cuff, a thin cardigan the color of oatmeal. He laid them in the drum one by one like he was putting a child to bed.
Then he stood there with his hand on the door of the machine.
“Marnie.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to be gone.”
“I know.”
“That’s the last of it. There’s no more of it anywhere. There’s nothing in the house, there’s nothing in the car, this is it, this is the last place on earth it is.”
“I know,” I said.
He shut the door. I gave him the quarters and he fed them in, and his hand went to the button and stopped, and I watched a man stand perfectly still for eleven seconds. Then he pressed it. The water started. The drum turned over once and the oatmeal cardigan went under.
He made a sound I am not going to describe.
I put my hand flat on his back between his shoulder blades and I left it there for the length of the wash cycle, which is thirty one minutes on that machine, and neither of us said one single word. Somewhere around minute twenty a man came in to change a twenty and I shook my head at him and he took one look and went back out.
At the end Tom moved everything to the dryer himself. He folded it all at the table with the particular care of a man who has decided that the folding is going to be done properly. Grey sweatshirt. Socks. Blue shirt, sleeves in, then in half. The cardigan last, and he took the longest over that one.
He put it in the bag and zipped it all the way with the paper clip.
“They smell like the soap,” he said.
“That’s what they smell like now.”
“Yeah.” He held the bag a second, and then he put it over his shoulder, and something in his shoulders was different, lower, like a thing that had been held up for a long time had been set down. “Okay.”
He got to the door. He stopped with his hand on it, which was a thing he did, I knew that about him by then.
“Are you here next Tuesday?”
“I’m here every Tuesday.”
“Could I come,” he said, “and not bring anything?”
Outside on Sixth a truck went past and the whole front window shook the way it always does, and I said yes, and he nodded once and went out into the last part of the night.
He came at two. He didn’t have the bag.
He had two coffees, and he’d gotten mine wrong, and I drank all of it.