The machine next to hers had someone else's life in it.
Elena didn't mean to look, but at 11 PM on a Tuesday the Wash-O-Mat on Clearfield was just her and the machines and the fluorescent flicker over the folding table, and the dryer next to hers was tumbling a stranger's load: two pairs of men's jeans, dark wash, a yellow rain slicker, six or seven black t-shirts, and a pair of tiny overalls. Toddler-sized. Denim with a strawberry patch on the pocket.
The stranger was outside smoking. She could see him through the window — mid-forties, work boots, scrolling his phone with his free hand. He hadn't folded anything yet. His dryer had been running when she arrived.
She sorted her own load. Whites in the basket, darks on the table. Her system was the same every week: fold standing up, stack by category, carry to the car in two trips because the basket was too small and she'd never bought a bigger one. Twelve years of the same basket with the cracked handle. Twelve years of this laundromat because the machines in her building ate quarters and gave back damp.
The tiny overalls came around again in the dryer window.
She thought about the strawberry patch. Someone had ironed it on, or maybe it came that way. Did they still make iron-on patches? Her mother used to fix everything with iron-on patches — not because they looked good but because you don't throw away what still works. A knee wears through, you patch it. The patch wears through, you patch the patch. Elena had worn jeans in fifth grade with so many patches they were more patch than jean, and she'd hated it, and she'd told her mother she hated it, and her mother had said then don't fall down so much.
The man came back in. He smelled like Parliaments and something mechanical — oil, maybe, or the residue of a job that involved machines larger than these. He opened his dryer, touched the jeans, decided they weren't done, and put in another quarter.
"Sorry," he said, though there was nothing to apologize for.
"You're fine."
He sat down in one of the plastic chairs along the wall. The chairs were orange and bolted to a rail so you couldn't move them, which Elena had always thought was a particular kind of distrust — not that you'd steal a chair from a laundromat, but that you'd rearrange them. Put them where they don't belong. Two chairs facing each other instead of all in a row facing the machines.
His phone rang. He looked at it, silenced it, put it in his pocket.
Elena folded a pillowcase. Then another. She had four pillowcases and only two pillows, which meant somewhere in her apartment there were two extra pillowcases doing nothing, waiting in a drawer for pillows that didn't exist. She kept them anyway. You keep things in pairs, even the wrong pairs.
The man's dryer buzzed. He pulled out the jeans and shook them once, hard, the way you shake a rug. Then the t-shirts, which he didn't fold — just balled up and dropped in his bag. The yellow slicker he hung over his arm. And then the overalls.
He held them up by the shoulder straps. They were so small. The whole garment could fit in one of his hands. He looked at them for a moment, and then he folded them — carefully, precisely, the way you fold something you've been taught to fold by someone who isn't there anymore to check. Straps crossed over the chest, legs folded up, the strawberry patch centered on top. He set them on the folding table, separate from the bag with the balled-up shirts.
Elena pretended to be sorting her socks.
He put the folded overalls into a plastic grocery bag, tied the handles, and placed the bag gently into his larger bag. Like a thing being nested inside a thing. Like something with its own container.
"Have a good one," he said on his way out.
"You too."
She listened to his truck start in the parking lot. Diesel — she could tell by the rattle. Then it pulled away and it was just her again and the fluorescent flicker and her four pillowcases and the ghost of Parliament smoke.
She finished folding. Carried the basket to her car in two trips, like always. Drove home, carried it upstairs, put everything away. Found the two extra pillowcases in the drawer where they always were, waiting for their pillows.
She left them there.
Some things you keep not because they're useful but because getting rid of them would mean deciding they'll never be needed, and you're not ready to decide that. Not tonight. Not while you can still see the strawberry patch going around and around in someone else's dryer, centered on the chest of something too small to wear anymore but too folded to throw away.