By nine in the morning the laundromat windows had clouded over, and the street outside looked as if someone had rubbed it with a thumb. Nora turned the sign from CLOSED to OPEN, propped the door with a brick, and carried her book behind the counter. She had brought it for that purpose, she told herself. The previous afternoon she had read forty pages while a stranger’s sheets went round, but there was no reason to mention this to anyone.
Outside, summer had flattened the neighborhood into bright surfaces. The pavement shimmered past the bus stop; a delivery truck idled with its back doors open, and the smell of warm bread traveled over from the bakery. Nora had been home three weeks and had done almost none of the things she said she would do. Her father’s apartment was still half packed after his move. She had not answered a letter from the college about returning in September. The envelope was tucked into her bag, beneath the novel, its corner going soft.
The novel belonged to Celia. It had a red cloth cover, worn pale at the edges, and no jacket. Somebody had written the name Marta Velez inside in blue ink. There were pencil marks on a few pages, small vertical lines beside paragraphs, and a coffee-colored ring near the back. Nora had chosen it from the shelf in the break room because she liked the heft of it. On the first page a woman arrived in a city carrying an empty birdcage. By page forty she had sold the cage and spent the money on a room with a lock.
At ten, a man with a basket of restaurant aprons asked whether the large washer was working. Nora said she hoped so, and he looked at her until she found the card that said LARGE WASHER: PUSH DOOR HARD BEFORE STARTING. When the machine began to fill, he gave her a little nod, neither grateful nor unkind, and sat under the fan with his eyes closed.
Celia, her aunt, had left her instruction cards for the machines. Nora opened the book again. She kept one finger between the pages when she went to make change, and returned to the same sentence each time. The woman with the birdcage had found work copying names into a hotel register. One of the guests had disappeared, leaving a pair of shoes outside his door. Nora was deciding whether the shoes were important when a child came in with a pillowcase that dragged behind him.
He was perhaps eleven, wearing a swimming shirt and two different sandals. He tipped the pillowcase onto the folding table, releasing a damp heap of towels. His grandmother, Mrs. Velez, followed him with detergent. “Luis, lift that bag,” she said.
“We counted before we left,” she said. “Six towels and the blue shirt.”
“Seven towels,” the boy said.
“Six. The striped one is a bath mat.”
They fed the pile into a machine and debated whether a bath mat counted as a towel while Nora sold them a packet of soap. The boy examined the book on the counter. “Is that a school book?”
“No.”
“Then why are you reading it so slowly?”
She almost said that she was working. Instead she told him about the missing guest and the shoes. He considered this, then suggested the guest had gone downstairs barefoot to steal breakfast. The older woman said that was exactly the kind of plan he would make. They sat together on the orange chairs, and he leaned his head against her arm while she checked something on her phone.
Nora noticed the name Velez on the woman’s purse and in the book. “Is this yours?” she asked.
Mrs. Velez took the book and opened the cover. “It was. I gave Celia a box after we moved my mother out of her apartment.” She tilted the pages toward the light. “This was her writing. I never got past the first chapter.”
Nora had already imagined Marta Velez as a woman who read in cafés and underlined sentences with great deliberation. She had not considered that Marta might be Mrs. Velez’s mother, or that the penciled lines might have been made with a grocery list waiting on the table. She asked whether Mrs. Velez remembered her mother reading the novel.
“I remember her reading everything,” Mrs. Velez said. “Including the instruction book for a new toaster. She wanted to know what would happen if you put a fork in it.”
“Did she try?” Luis asked.
“She had four children. She didn’t need to.”
The washers stopped with a clunk that made both of them turn. Nora helped carry the wet towels to a dryer. They were heavier than she expected, and she held the basket against her stomach. Mrs. Velez showed Luis how to clear the lint screen before starting the machine. The lint came off in one gray sheet, with a blue thread caught near the center. Luis wanted to keep it. His grandmother told him he could keep it until they got to the trash can.
At noon the electricity flickered. The fan stopped, started again, and the television above the vending machine went black. Across the street the bakery’s OPEN sign went dark too. The dryers continued to turn for a moment, then slowed and stopped, leaving the room suddenly full of smaller sounds: the tick of cooling metal, a truck backing up, someone calling from an upstairs window.
The man with the aprons opened one eye. “How long?”
“I don’t know,” Nora said. She found a card labeled POWER OUTAGE, but it only gave a number to call and told her to make sure the door was unlocked. The phone company’s recorded voice said crews had been notified. It did not give a time. Nora wrote the information on the back of a receipt and taped it to the front door, though the tape would not hold to the damp glass and she had to use four pieces.
Mrs. Velez checked the towels. They were still wet in the middle. “We can wait a little,” she said, but Luis looked alarmed. He had a swimming lesson at two, and the blue shirt was in the dryer.
“You can wear another shirt,” she told him.
“It has the pass in the pocket.”
They looked through the round glass at the motionless blue shirt, which had settled behind two towels. Nora brought a chair so Luis could stand and reach the back of the drum. He extracted the shirt, and from its pocket came a laminated card, a pebble, and a receipt for a strawberry ice pop. He set the card on the counter to dry. The pebble went back in his pocket.
Mrs. Velez read silently. Her mouth moved once, around a word she did not say aloud. Then she turned back a page, found another pencil line, and smiled. “She would have liked this woman,” she said. “She never trusted a person who claimed to be entirely innocent.”
“Is the woman in trouble?” Luis asked.
“I haven’t got that far,” Nora said. “She might have taken something that belonged to the missing guest.”
“His breakfast,” Luis said.
Mrs. Velez gave the book back. “Tell me if she did.”
Nora read while they waited, though the room had grown noisy again. A bus expelled a long breath at the curb; two teenagers came in, saw the stopped machines, and left. She read a paragraph twice because she had been thinking about the envelope in her bag. On the third pass she understood that the hotel clerk had lied to protect her brother, not herself. It changed the scene she had read that morning. Nora went back several pages, found the place where the brother first appeared, and saw that he had already been mentioned in a sentence she had barely noticed.
Her father had offered to pay for another semester, even if it meant taking extra shifts. She had thanked him without saying that she did not want to return to the same course. She liked the work in the print shop where she had spent two afternoons a week, setting type and cleaning rollers; she dreaded the lectures she had chosen because they sounded sensible when spoken aloud. She was ashamed of how much the print shop mattered to her, and equally ashamed that she had let her father believe the decision was only about money.
The power returned at one seventeen, according to the clock above the counter, which immediately began flashing twelve. The dryers started again. The fan turned toward Nora, lifting the receipt from the door; she caught it before it reached the floor. The man with the aprons stood up. Mrs. Velez checked the time on her phone, folded the blue shirt into a bag, and told Luis they would take the rest home damp. He had missed the first ten minutes of his lesson, but she thought they might still let him in.
At the door she hesitated. “That book can stay here,” she said. “Mama would have preferred it being read to sitting in my closet.”
“I’ll tell you what happens.”
“Only if you finish before I come back next Thursday. Otherwise I’ll have to read it myself.”
After they left, Nora finished drying the aprons and helped the man fold them into square stacks. He paid with bills from a tin box and thanked her for keeping the shop open. At three the room emptied. She ate a tomato sandwich behind the counter, careful to hold the book away from the bread. A seed escaped anyway and landed on the margin. She lifted it with the corner of a napkin, leaving a small wet mark beside one of Marta’s pencil lines.
Near the end of the afternoon, Nora called her father. He answered on the third ring with the distracted voice he used when he was trying to carry something and speak at the same time. She heard a cupboard shut.
“I need to tell you about September,” she said.
There was a pause. He asked if she had decided not to go back. She said she had decided not to go back to the course she was in, and that she wanted to find out whether she could work at the print shop while taking a different class. She had not worked out the money. She had not even asked whether the shop needed her. Her father was quiet long enough for her to hear the refrigerator tapping behind him.
“I thought you hated that place,” he said.
“The college?”
“The print shop. You always came home with ink on your hands and complained about the smell.”
“I complained because you asked why I was scrubbing so hard.”
He laughed, then apologized for laughing. They talked until a customer came in carrying a comforter in a clear plastic bag. Her father said they would look at the numbers together that evening. It was not a solution, and she still had the letter to answer, but she could picture the two of them at the kitchen table with a pencil between them.
At closing time the street was still warm. Nora swept a crescent of lint from beneath the machines and counted the change twice, because the first total seemed too large. She checked the washer doors, unplugged the fan, and turned the sign. The book went into her bag above the college envelope. On the bus home she opened it to the place she had marked with a spare yellow card. The missing guest had left the hotel on his own, taking the wrong pair of shoes. Nora read on past her stop, noticed only when the bus pulled away, and walked back through the long evening with the card tucked carefully between the pages.