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She is filling the kettle when she notices the slippers by the door. They are her mother's —...
The mug was still on the draining board when she arrived, face-down on the rubber mat as if it had...
She was folding someone else's forgotten sock when the machine behind her stopped. It was half past...
She was sorting the kitchen drawers when she found the list. It was written on the back of an...
The last machine at the end of the row was still running when she arrived at half past eleven, the...
She was feeding coins into the last working dryer when the door opened and let in the cold.
The launderette was at the corner of two streets that had no reason to intersect, and she came here only when the boiler at her flat packed in, which it did most autumns. She had brought a book but left it in the car. Now she watched the clothes turn — a coral blouse, two white shirts, a pair of grey socks she didn't remember buying.
Inside the drum, caught under the lip of the rubber seal, was a child's red mitten.
She fished it out. It was dry, clean, knitted in that particular red that only exists in things made for children. She set it on top of the machine, face-up, where someone might see it.
The person who'd come in from the cold was a man in his sixties with a canvas holdall. He set the bag down, looked around the room as if checking something had not changed, and began to sort his washing into piles on the folding table. He worked methodically, the way people do when they've been doing a thing alone for a long time.
After a while he said, without looking up, "Warm enough in here."
"Just about," she said.
He loaded his machine, fed it coins, and sat on the bench opposite. He had a small radio, the kind with a pull-out aerial, and he set it beside him but didn't turn it on.
Her dryer stopped. She transferred the clothes to her bag, working quickly, and the coral blouse caught on the zip and she had to pause.
She remembered, then, that her mother had owned a blouse almost exactly that colour. She hadn't thought about it in years — the blouse, or the particular way her mother folded things, sleeves tucked in first, always.
She picked up the red mitten from the top of the machine and held it for a moment before setting it back down in plain sight.
Outside, the street was the same as it had always been. The launderette's window threw a square of yellow light onto the wet pavement and she stood in it briefly before walking to the car.
She thought, later, that she hadn't asked the man whether the mitten was his. She had assumed it wasn't. She didn't know why.
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