David approached one woman, who noticed him and was already shaking her head at the look on his face.
“I’d love to help you fold your clothes,” he said.
“No,” she said. “No, honey.”
He looked at the woman next to the first woman, her friend it seemed, because they looked at each other and then the friend spoke. “I’m not going to let a crazy man fold my clothes,” she said. The women laughed, and David laughed too. “No offense,” she said.
“You don’t have to be crazy to fold clothes,” he said. “But it helps.”
“I don’t care how crazy you are, as long as you’re working for me,” said a third woman, so small beside the folding table that it seemed as if she would be more comfortable underneath. “Come here,” she said, and David saw that it was the woman from the first night, Shelly, and she was wearing earth tones again, and he had not seen her from across the room because she was much smaller than he remembered and had been hidden by the machines.
“How are you?” David asked.
Shelly pushed a pile of warm shirts over to him and he picked one up. “Sick and tired,” she said, glancing at him. “You know, you could probably stand to do a load or two while you’re here. I have some spare shirts if you need.”
“I’m fine.”
She shrugged and returned to folding. “Some days I’m mostly sick, and then it hits me how tired I am. Opposite sides of the same rolling coin.”
The shirt he picked up was long-sleeved. He held the collar and flipped the sleeves back. “I feel more tired lately,” he said. “People keep coming to my house.”
“Not like that,” she said. David widened his grip on the shoulders, but she shook her head. “Here,” she said, digging into a bag at her feet and hauling out a clipboard nearly the size of her torso. She took the shirt and flattened it on the table, positioned the board in the center, and folded the sleeves inward. She tucked the shirtsleeves back, flipped the board over, and slid it out in a smooth motion, leaving a perfectly folded shirt.
“I’ll try again,” David said, reaching for the folded shirt.
She snapped it off the table and laid it in her rolling basket. “You’ll find no utility in going backward,” she said. “Move forward.” She prodded the pile.
He took another shirt, positioned the clipboard, made a few false starts with the sleeves, but placed them, flipped the shirt over, and removed the board.
The woman clapped once. “There you go,” she said. “Soon you’ll be doing it without the board. Soon you won’t even need your eyes. There’s a goal.”
The two friends on the other side of the table snickered but stopped abruptly when the small woman pointed at them. “You won’t always have your eyes,” the woman said. “You lose everything you love in the order in which you love it.” David finished another shirt and the woman patted his arm. “You’re so kind to help,” she said. “So kind, without expecting anything in return.”
He felt kind, though her words made him wonder what he could expect in return. It was possible this woman knew something about Franny, had seen or spoken with her on one of Franny’s trips to the laundromat. He pictured his wife with a load of towels from the salon, a bag stuffed full of curtains requiring the delicate cycle. He imagined her measuring cupfuls of detergent and bleach into the industrial-size washer, loading quarters into the machine, and settling down in one of the yellow plastic chairs with a magazine advertising a pill you could take to make your eyelashes grow faster.
“The expression on your face,” Shelly said. “I could eat it.”
David held up his hand to the offer. They folded shirts while he thought about Franny propping her feet on a rolling cart or wiping spilled detergent from a machine with a towel and dropping that towel into the wash with the rest. Franny’s eyes shone when she saw him folding from across the room. “You moron,” Franny said, smiling, beatific. She was holding an incisor in an oversize antique gold tooth extractor.
“Listen, I don’t see you for months, and this is some—”
She raised one finger to her lips and he was quiet. The extractor seemed heavy, and she leveraged her elbow into her side for support. David could see that her arm was spotted with wounds, like cherries dropped over a field of snow. The marks clustered around her wrist and pinpricked all the way up her arm and into her dress, which draped her body in ivory. His mouth dried suddenly, as if he had swabbed it.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
She shrugged. Her saint’s smile skewed and she lifted both arms, hefting the tooth and its extractor skyward, exaggerating the shrug, a move that showed David the red marks on her other arm as well, a constellation blooming red, spreading and darkening as the blood dotted in individual pools and then broke through their membranes and streamed down her arms, veining together and dripping down her elbows, her arms lifted, the extractor in her fist raised to the ceiling in a pose that David realized now was a bleeding diorama placed for him.
He clenched his teeth but could not make a connection from molar to molar. His inability to grind the teeth to powder inspired a closed-mouth scream, pushing the air from his body in the scream until his vision spangled and his balance shifted, at which point he became aware of pressure around his body and realized that the women in the laundromat had surrounded him. The two friends were holding him by the arms, restraining him while Shelly was trying to push her gloved hand into his clenched mouth, leaning into it and pushing as hard as she could against the barrier of his jaw. Others stood and cheered, blocking the exit.
Shelly whacked him on the jaw with the palm of her hand as if he was a dog. The indignity of it made him slacken his face. She laughed, but the women were still gripping him by both arms, moving him toward the door. One of them said, “God damn, but you are an idiot,” and the other said, “Get it right out of here.”
The other people in the laundromat moved out of their way. He bent his arms at the elbow to grasp the bar on the glass door so the three of them wouldn’t crash into it. The friends increased their velocity at the threshold and threw him out, his feet leaving the ground with the force of their outward motion. He landed unevenly and tumbled down, skinning his hand on the parking sign he had grasped for stability.
“I’m sorry,” he said. A pinkish hue welled into his hand, then a line of blood.
One of them waved her hand at him with a go on motion and headed back inside while the other held the door open. “You scared that old lady,” she said. “Shame on you.”
“Tell her I’m sorry.”
Now the other one waved her hand. “You’re not watching where you are,” she said, closing the door behind her. He assumed she was speaking figuratively until a tall Weimaraner on a leash stepped gingerly on his stomach with a front paw and then a back paw as he progressed.
The dog’s owner approached on the other end of the slack leash. David couldn’t see the man’s face from his position on the ground. “You were in his path,” the owner said from above. Dog and owner approached the end of the sidewalk, looked each way, and crossed the street.
42
THE POLICE STATION was centered in the main town square and surrounded by a constant stop-and-go flow of traffic. The building, which was the color of old oatmeal in a jar, had once been the town’s first bank. Inside, dusty marble floors matched the walls and baseboards stained with neglect. The building was a hundred years old, and few improvements had been made to the electrical map over the course of its life. Schoolchildren on station tours blinked when they entered the dark rotunda from outside. They bumped into one another, necks craned back toward the domed ceiling.