But Monday morning, I got up at six like always, put on my work shoes, took my key ring, walked down Madison Street, and let myself in and finished the work.
Fourteen baskets were sitting on that shelf. Tagged, paid for, promised, and she had gone coin-only on a Monday with fourteen families’ clothes in the building.
Two of them belong to women who work at the plant and pick up at six. One is scrubs. One is the Ramirez family, and their towels go in thirds.
I ran every one of them. Washed, dried, folded, tagged, up on the shelf in order, and I was done at twenty till eleven.
Then I put my key on the counter by the register and I went home, and I never saw that woman at all.
Before I left I took one thing off the wall, and I asked permission first, and not from her.
Walt Kinsey hand-lettered the price board in 1998. Poster board, a brush, a straightedge. It hung over that folding table twenty-seven years and everybody quit seeing it about 2005.
She had already taken it down and stood it behind the soda machine.
Wash and fold, and the prices, and down at the bottom in the small lettering:
An attendant is not an expense. Anybody can put a quarter in a machine. A person who will fold your good shirt right and never say one word about what is in your basket is the only thing this place sells that the one across town cannot.
Walt died in 2021. His daughter Charlene lives out on Route 5. I called her Sunday night and she said take it, and then she said some things about her father’s second wife that I am not going to repeat.
People started leaving baskets on my porch by Wednesday. I did not ask for that and I told the first four of them no.
Then Charlene called back and offered me the front room of her husband’s dry cleaner two doors down, which had a water hookup and a gas line already because it used to be a beauty shop, and I said yes before she finished the sentence.
Four machines. Two dryers. My name on the window in vinyl letters that cost me ninety dollars.
Nine months now. Thirty-one regular baskets and I turn work away. I hired Deanna Poteet in September, fifty-four, laid off from the school, and I trained her the way Walt trained me.
The Wash Barrel is still open and doing all right, coin-only, and I have never said a word against it and told Deanna she is not to either. Some folks just want a quarter and a machine and there is nothing wrong with that.
Walt’s price board hangs over my folding table. Charlene had the glass put in it. The prices on it are thirty years out of date and I would not change one of them for anything.
She called me a granny touching people’s underwear. I have carried this town’s Sunday best in my hands for twenty-seven years and not one soul ever heard from me what was in a basket. That is the whole job, and Walt wrote it on poster board in 1998 where she walked past it every day.