And hoped she wouldn’t.

And then she headed back inside and went back down to the laundry room. When she got there, the radio was playing a song about what happens when you break up with someone in a small town. And she danced a little and wondered what her life would be like if she broke up with Eric—but then realized that she wasn’t quite ready to wonder about that, so she stopped wondering about it and sat on the bench and read the other articles in her YOU! magazine.

She read the one about the jeans.

And one about how makeup could save her life.

And one about gratitude.

And one about healthy versions of everyone’s favorite desserts. They looked gross.

And the next thing she knew, the dryers’ buzzers were cutting through a song about what love isn’t, alerting her that her clothes were dry. And she got up and unloaded her clothes and dumped them on the clothes-folding table and then went back to the dryers and cleaned out the lint filters for the next user, because that was a house rule, and Marvalyn was a rule follower.

Then she grabbed the ironing board and unfolded it, because she had to iron Eric’s work clothes. The old contraption resisted and screeched at Marvalyn as she did, and she made a mental note to WD-40 the thing the next time she used it.

Once the ironing board was set up, she got the iron off the shelf where the pay-what-you-CAN was. Then she went to the deep stainless-steel sink by the washing machines and filled the iron’s water chamber and then plugged it in and set it on the ironing board and started folding her laundry while she waited for it to steam. She folded towels and T-shirts and underwear and sweatshirts and sweatpants and jeans, and then she paired the socks, and then placed what she had folded and paired in her laundry basket.

The iron had been sighing with steam for a while, letting Marvalyn know that it was ready to be employed, so she gathered up Eric’s work clothes—khaki pants and navy and gold polo shirts with the Dollar Discount Plus! emblem on the left breast pocket—and prepared to iron them. They were wrinkle-free, but Marvalyn ironed them anyway. Because she wanted Eric to look good for work. Or as good as he could look. His work clothes were getting too small for him. She wondered when he had gotten fat. He was skinny when they had met.

After she ironed the five Dollar Discount Plus! shirts, she hung them on a rod above the clothes-folding table and concentrated on pressing a perfect crease into one of Eric’s pant legs—as if that crease was going to get Eric promoted from assistant manager to full-fledged manager. Even though Eric said he didn’t want a promotion—because his job at the Dollar Discount Plus! was temporary. He wanted to get a job at the paper mill. There was an opening on the machine that made butter wrappers.