She says, “my father never told the same story twice...heck, he never told the same story once.”

He says, “I remember my grandmother using words like ‘Lordy’ and ‘the dickens’.”

They’re sitting and waiting in the laundromat on their clothes, first for them to be washed and then for them to be dried.

During the wash cycle there are a couple of kind, gentle people to talk to—an older lady dressed in a white t-shirt and bright red Adidas sweatpants and her grandson who’s going to Europe for three weeks later in the summer—but they began their waiting a good hour earlier and get up and leave the laundromat the moment their laundry’s dry and their clothes folded and put away in the bag they use for such things.

Meanwhile, the owner of the laundromat, at least I presume it’s the owner, has placed a stack of books on one of the ‘folding’ tables for people like us—people waiting on their laundry in a laundromat—to read while they’re waiting for their laundry. Unfortunately, they’re the kind of books written by writers who write books to be read by people who belong to bookclubs: therefore, neither of them are interested in any of the books. And so she sits and he sits and they watch their clothes tumble around, first in the soapy water of the washer and then in the hot air of the dryer.

As he watches their laundry go round and round in the dryer, he thinks, ‘fortunes used to be made in cotton and tobacco but now fortunes are made in laundromats, quarter by quarter.’ He doesn’t know what she thinks but he thinks she would agree with what he’s thinking.

Man reading whilst waiting for his clothes to dry, Franklin, NC. June 12, 2019. Photo by author.