The Last Spin

The laundromat smelled like old dryer sheets and dust, and Marion stood in front of the change machine for the third time, patting her jacket pockets with the growing dread of a woman who already knew what she was going to find, which was nothing. She had driven out of the campground that morning with a bag of clothes that had somehow acquired the smell of campfire smoke, and she had been so pleased with herself for finding a town at all, even a scrubby little one on the edge of nowhere in northern New Mexico, that she had not once thought about her wallet until this exact moment.

"No, no, no," she said to the humming fluorescent lights, and went through the pockets properly this time, both jacket pockets, then the front pocket of her jeans, then the back ones, then the little zippered pocket of the canvas bag she carried everywhere, the one with her phone and her earbuds and a paperback she had barely opened. Nothing. She dug through the laundry bag too, shaking out shirts and socks onto the folding table like a woman conducting a very sad ritual, and a single quarter rolled out and spun on the linoleum and lay flat, mocking her.

She tried to think. She had paid for gas two towns back, she was almost sure of it, and she had bought coffee at the campground store, and after that, nothing, just the long drive and the quiet and the radio, so the wallet could be anywhere between here and a fifty mile stretch of highway, or it could be sitting in the grass by her tent, or it could be gone forever, and with it her license and her one credit card and the sixty dollars in cash she had pulled from an ATM in a moment of optimism. She was twenty-six years old, a pharmacist with a steady job back in Denver that she had taken a week of vacation to escape, and here she was on day two of her grand solo adventure, stranded at a laundromat next to a gas station that had closed sometime before she was born.

She sat down hard on one of the plastic chairs bolted in a row against the wall and put her face in her hands. The washers churned behind her, three of them running with other people's laundry, or maybe nobody's laundry, since she had not seen a single other person since she walked in. The town had one main street, four buildings and a water tower, and the laundromat appeared to be the only thing still operating, unless you counted the church, which had a sign out front with a service time but no car in the lot. This was not exactly the escape from loneliness she had promised herself, but it was certainly an escape from everything else.

* * *

Geoffrey came in through the door with the broken bell, carrying a plastic jug of water and a paper sack from the one store that was open, and he saw a woman sitting in the row of chairs with her head down and a small pile of clothes dumped on the folding table in front of her, and he slowed down, because he recognized the posture. He had seen it on moving jobs a hundred times, the particular hunch of somebody who has just lost something important and is doing the math in their head about how bad it is going to be.

He almost said something, then almost did not, then decided that leaving her alone would be the kind of thing he would kick himself for later, since he had spent the last three days in a box truck and the prospect of talking to an actual human being was doing strange and welcome things to his mood. He set the jug down on the counter, next to a battered record player he had noticed on his way in, an actual turntable sitting there among the detergent and the lint, which struck him as the strangest detail about this whole strange stop.

"Hey," he said, from a polite distance, hands in his pockets so he would look less like a stranger looming over a stranger. "You okay? You look like somebody stole your dog."

She lifted her head. He was tall, dusty, somewhere in his late twenties, with the tired eyes of a man who drove for a living, and she wiped her face with her sleeve and tried to assemble something resembling dignity, which did not really work.

"Worse," she said. "My wallet's gone. I think it's back at the campground, or on the highway, or in a ditch somewhere, and my clothes are in a pile and I have exactly one quarter to my name."

"Ah," he said, and winced in a way that told her he had been there before. "That's rough. That's, yeah, that's genuinely rough."

"I've checked everything twice. It's gone."

He turned to look around the room, half out of habit, the way he always scanned a room, and his eyes caught on something low near the row of dryers, a dark shape under one of the plastic chairs, half tucked against a leg. He walked over and crouched, and came back up holding a worn brown wallet in two fingers.

"Any chance this is yours?"

Marion was on her feet so fast the chair rocked. "Oh my god. Oh my god, yes, that's it, that's mine." She took it from him and flipped it open, and there was her license, looking slightly glamorous in the fluorescent light, and her credit card, and her sixty dollars, all of it, everything still there. She laughed, a real laugh, the kind that came out of her mostly by surprise, and pressed the wallet against her chest like it was a small rescued animal. "Where was that? I looked everywhere."

"Under the chair by the dryers. It slid under, probably. Chairs eat wallets, it's a known thing."

"You are literally my favorite person in the state of New Mexico right now." She stuck out her hand. "Marion. I was about two minutes from a full meltdown, so thank you, seriously."

He shook it. His grip was warm and callused. "Geoffrey. I'm just passing through, hauling a house load of furniture to Tucson, and I stopped because my truck is making a noise I don't like and because this was the only place with lights on." He nodded at the window, where the box truck sat crooked in the gravel lot next to the dead gas station, its pumps rusting under a sagging canopy. "Turns out this town has, by my count, one open business, and it's the laundromat."

"And the store," Marion said, pointing at his paper sack.

"Okay, two open businesses. A veritable metropolis."

She was still smiling at him, and he noticed, and she noticed him noticing, and neither of them made anything of it out loud, but the room felt a little less empty than it had five minutes ago. She slid the wallet into her back pocket, this time with the deliberate care of a woman who had learned her lesson, and went back to the folding table to scoop up the clothes she had dumped out and load a washer, now that she could pay for one, cheeks a little pink, mostly from laughing, partly from something else.

"So," Geoffrey said, leaning against the counter, unscrewing the cap of the water jug. "I'm going to be here a while, waiting on a part for the truck, or at least waiting on a mechanic who doesn't exist in this town to tell me the part doesn't exist either. And you've got a whole wash cycle ahead of you, apparently, plus a dryer." He glanced at the row of dryers and stopped, because one of them had a piece of paper taped to the door at eye level, handwritten, the letters big and slightly crooked.

OUT OF ORDER. FIX GUY COMES THURSDAYS.

"Today's Wednesday," Marion read aloud, and sighed. "Of course it is."

"So three working dryers and a bunch of us with wet laundry," Geoffrey said, and looked at the clock above the counter, which said the evening had barely started, and then at the record player, and then back at her. "Well. I guess we're all stuck here together for a while."

"Stuck together," Marion repeated, and something about the way she said it, half complaint and half not, made him grin into his water jug.

The wash cycle was going to take thirty-six minutes, and the clock said it had used up four of them, and the room had settled into that particular laundromat silence where the only sounds were the sloshing of machines and the hum of the fluorescent tubes overhead, which flickered once in a while in a way that made Marion think about how far the nearest hospital was, which was a thought pharmacists probably were not supposed to have on vacation.

Geoffrey had claimed a plastic chair and turned it around backwards, arms folded over the backrest, and he was watching the machines with the patience of a man who spent a lot of his life waiting in places that were not designed for waiting. Marion lined up her detergent and her quarters in neat little rows because that was the kind of person she was, and she kept sneaking glances at him when she thought he was not looking, and he was doing the same thing to her, and both of them were bad enough at hiding it that it had almost become a joke already, a joke with no words in it yet.

It was Geoffrey who broke first, because he got up to look for a trash can and found instead the whole back corner of the counter, where a battered turntable sat half buried under a stack of takeout menus and a coffee mug with a pen in it, and beside the turntable, leaning against the wall like it had been forgotten there on purpose, was a single vinyl record in a sleeve gone soft and gray at the corners. He blew on it, which did nothing, and rubbed the dust off with his sleeve, and squinted at the label.

"Well, look at this," he said, turning it so she could see. "Some seventies folk thing. Somebody left their whole record collection and somebody else stole all of it except this one."

"Do not put that on," Marion said, without any real force behind it. "That is not what this place is for. This place is for fluorescent misery and warm soda from the machine."

But he was already plugging the thing in, tracing the cord to an outlet behind the counter that had apparently been live this whole time, and he dropped the needle with the confidence of a man who had done it a hundred times in other people's living rooms while moving their furniture, and after a scratchy moment of nothing the room filled up with a slow acoustic guitar and a man's voice singing about a road, or a river, or possibly both, the sound thin and warm and slightly warped, like it was coming up through water.

Marion stood there with a sock in her hand and decided that she was not going to admit how much she liked it.

"Okay, that's actually kind of good," she admitted, two songs later, sitting up on the folding table with her feet on a chair.

"Right? And look, there's room," Geoffrey said, and held out his hand, palm up, in a gesture so old-fashioned and so goofy that it should not have worked at all, and it worked completely. "One dance. Slow one's coming up next, I can feel it. You dance, I assume, being a sophisticated Denver pharmacist."

"I dance at weddings," she said, taking his hand anyway and sliding off the table. "Badly, and only after cake."

"That's the only correct way to dance." And the slow song did come up next, some crooning thing about leaving in the morning, and he put one hand on her waist with a question in it, waiting until she nodded before he settled it there, and she put her hands up on his shoulders, and they swayed in the middle of the empty laundromat like two people at the world's worst wedding, turning slowly under the buzzing lights while the machines churned behind them.

He was a little taller than her, and his hand was warm through her shirt, and the record had a wobble in it, a little dip in the pitch every few turns, and somehow that made it better, made it feel found instead of played. She was laughing at something by the third verse, she could not even remember what, maybe the way he counted under his breath to keep the beat, and the room had gotten smaller and warmer without anyone touching the thermostat.

Then the dryer nearest them made a sound as loud and sharp as a rifle shot and died.

They both jumped apart, and Marion actually yelped, and they stood there staring at the machine, which had gone completely dark and silent, its little window gone black.

"Well," Geoffrey said, after a moment. "That's one of the three."

"It's nine o'clock at night in a town with four buildings," Marion said, walking over and pressing the buttons, which did nothing, and then thumping the side of it, which also did nothing but felt morally necessary. "Nobody is coming. That note said Thursdays. Thursdays. We are going to be here all night."

"All night," he repeated, and there was that half-and-half tone again, the one they were both using now without discussing it.

They put her wet clothes in the two remaining dryers, which meant everything would take twice as long, and then there was nothing to do but sit, and the record had run out and Geoffrey flipped it and let it play again from the other side, and the hours started to stretch and soften. He told her about the moving job, how he had fallen into it at twenty-three because a cousin of a friend needed a third pair of arms for a weekend and he had never really stopped, how he had a room he kept in Phoenix that he slept in maybe ten nights a month, how his last real relationship had been with a woman named Darcy he met at a climbing gym when he was twenty-five, six months of her trying to make a schedule out of a man who did not have one, ending in a conversation that had been sad and kind and final. He talked about Tucson like a place he had been to eleven times and never seen.

Marion told him about the pharmacy, the fluorescent mornings, counting pills for people who called her sweetheart and could not remember her name, the brief fling last year with a fellow pharmacist named Bo that had burned bright for two months and gone out politely, both of them agreeing they were better as coworkers, which was true and still somehow stung. She told him about the week off she had given herself, day two of seven, a campsite and a cooler and a book she had not opened, and she heard herself say the true thing before she had decided