Clean Sheets and Country Air

The dryer had been dead for days, apparently. The sign taped to it said so. I read it anyway, twice, like it might change its mind for me.

"Fantastic," I said to nobody.

I was fifty-two years old, standing in a laundromat in Wyoming at eleven at night, holding a garbage bag full of wet clothes. My motel had promised working machines. The motel lied. The front desk kid shrugged and pointed across the street.

The festival had dumped a couple hundred people into a town with two traffic lights. Everyone smelled like beer. Everyone was having a better time than me. I came out here to work on a manuscript in peace and instead my socks were soaked because the motel sink backed up.

I jammed my clothes into the dead dryer anyway. Refusal therapy. The drum didn't turn. I pressed the button again. Nothing.

"You have to sweet-talk that one. Or kick it. Kick it left of center."

I turned around. A man stood in the doorway holding a trash bag in one hand and a crate of records in the other. Tall. Gray coming in at the temples. A beard he kept trimmed, which told me something. His boots had mud on them.

"You're kicking it?" I said. "Or I am?"

"You. You look like you've got more reasons."

He set his bag down by the one working washer and introduced himself. Jamal. He was forty-four, grew hops about twenty miles out of town, and the washer out at his farmhouse had died that week. So here he was, washing everything he owned at midnight.

"That's a rough night," I said.

"Yours looks worse. You've got the dead dryer."

We worked out a deal without much talking about it. He had one working machine and I had a bag of wet clothes and he just said, "Throw yours in with mine. Hot water, normal cycle. I've done worse with less."

I hesitated for about two seconds and then dumped my clothes in with a stranger's. It's not like I was wearing any secrets. He fed quarters into the slot and sat down in a plastic chair and I sat in the one next to him.

That's when I noticed the crate.

"Are those records?"

"Vinyl. Yeah. I take them everywhere, which is stupid."

"Can I look?"

He pulled one out and handed it across. An old blues album, the label half worn off. I knew that label. I used to buy reissues off it in the eighties with money I didn't have.

"My husband had this same pressing," I said. "Or one like it. He sold all of them in ninety-eight when we needed the cash. I never let him live it down."

Jamal laughed. "The one thing you never forgive."

"The one thing."

He talked a little about the album. Who played on it. What the pressing was worth, which was nothing, which was fine by him. He had that way of being interested without needing me to be as interested. I liked that. I've spent years around writers who need you to match their volume.

Then a guy came in off the street. Festival wristband, no shirt under his open jacket, about twenty-six years old if he was a day. He went straight for the payphone on the wall, which I didn't know still worked, and started calling somebody about where the after-party was.

"LARRY," he shouted into the receiver. "LARRY. THE FAIRGROUNDS, MAN. WHICH GATE."

Jamal and I looked at each other. We didn't say anything. We just waited. The kid argued with Larry for four solid minutes about a gate. Then he hung up, said "unbelievable" to the empty laundromat, and wandered back out.

"Where is there even a fairgrounds gate confusion," I said.

"Two gates. It's a real problem out here."

We cracked up. Properly. The kind where you keep restarting. I don't laugh like that at home. I thought about that for a second and put it away.

"So hops," I said. "What is that even like? Growing them."

He leaned back. The chairs were bolted to the floor so it didn't go far.

"Best smell in farming," he said. "You rub a fresh cone between your hands and it's like citrus and hay and something green underneath. People pay money for candles that smell half that good."

"I've never touched a plant on purpose," I admitted. "I'm from Chicago. We have plantings. They're decorative. Nobody touches them."

He looked genuinely shocked. "Never? Not even a tomato?"

"I've killed three basil plants. That's the extent of it."

"Three basil plants is almost a crime. Basil wants to live. You have to work at killing basil."

"I'm talented."

The washer finished its cycle and he got up to move everything to the dryer. The good dryer. He held the door for my clothes like it was a restaurant. My blouse went in on top of his socks and neither of us mentioned how that looked.

We sat back down. The machine thumped. Outside, the festival noise had thinned out some, though a band was still going somewhere past midnight.

"So what brings an editor to Wyoming?" he asked. I hadn't told him yet. He caught me off guard, that he'd remembered.

"A manuscript. A guy wrote four hundred pages about a sheep ranch. Somebody has to fix it."

"And you drew the short straw?"

"I drew all the straws. I own the company." I told him about the business, small, doing fine. I told him I was staying at the motel across the street, which was a mistake, and that my husband Bo was home in Chicago probably sleeping in front of the television.

I don't know why I said the husband part. Or maybe I do. It was one in the morning and the laundromat smelled like soap and the man next to me was talking about music the way I like people to talk about music, with his hands.

"What about you," I said. "Married?"

"Divorced. Ten years ago now. I was thirty-four. It didn't take."

"Kids?"

"No. You?"

"Two. Grown. One in Seattle, one in Denver. Both of them call me more than I deserve."

"That's not a thing people say."

"It is tonight."

The dryer clicked off somewhere in there. Neither of us moved to fold anything. He pulled another record out of the crate and handed it over, and I held it, and the night kept going.

The fluorescents over the folding tables had been flickering for an hour. I kept waiting for one of us to comment on it. Neither of us did. Then all four tubes quit at once with a click, and the whole place went dim except the little windows on the washers and the glow from the vending machine.

"Well," Jamal said. "That's dramatic."

"You think it's a sign?"

"Of what?"

"I don't know. Bad wiring."

He got up and went to his crate by the door. He'd brought it in with his laundry, which I still thought was strange, but it was starting to make