The Suds-O-Matic on Grand Avenue was a long, bright, humming room with a linoleum floor the color of weak tea and two rows of avocado-green washers facing each other down the middle like a ballroom dance that had stalled. The dryers were stacked along the back wall, their round glass doors full of tumbling color, and the air was warm and damp and smelled of hot lint and bleach and fabric softener, and somebody's transistor radio on top of the change machine was playing the afternoon news out of WELI very quietly to no one. The front windows were steamed solid. An old man in a cardigan was folding undershirts at the long table with enormous care, as if each one were a flag. A young mother sat on the bench by the soap dispenser with a baby asleep on her shoulder and a toddler in a snowsuit asleep across her knees. A Yale student was reading Kierkegaard and eating Fritos.
And at the very back, sitting on top of the folding table with her tan boots dangling and her cream coat folded beside her, watching dryer number nine go round, was Delia.
She had changed out of the burgundy dress into jeans and a fisherman's sweater, but her hair was still the hair his mother had set that morning with the hot rollers, feathered and honey-blonde and full, and her face was still the face she had put on at the breakfast table, though the liner had blurred into a soft brown haze from crying and most of the gloss was gone. She had her chin in her hand. She was not reading anything. She was just watching the clothes tumble, the way people do in laundromats, as if something important might surface in the window if they waited long enough.
She did not look up when the bell over the door jangled.
Wes walked down the aisle between the avocado washers with the Silvertone case in one hand. The old man stopped folding. The Yale student lowered Kierkegaard. The young mother opened one eye.
He stopped in front of the folding table. Delia looked up.
For a moment her face did nothing at all. Then it did a great many things very quickly, and settled on something careful and guarded and so tired that it hurt him to see.
"How did you find me?"
"Mrs. Moretti," said Wes. "She called me a stupid boy."