He closed the composition book he had been studying and put it in a black backpack that he always had with him. And he pulled another black marble composition notebook out of it labeled THINGS THAT CAN HURT YOU and opened it to a page about two-thirds of the way through and took a stubby pencil out of his shirt pocket and added the word irons to it.

Then he looked at Marvalyn, who had made her way to the sink so she could soothe her burn with cold water and then picked the iron up off the floor, inspecting it. It seemed to be fine. It said it was heavy-duty. And then she licked her right index finger and touched it to the iron to see if it was still hot, and it wasn’t. It was only a little warm. So she wrapped the cord around it and returned it to the shelf where it lived.

Then she scooped her laundry basket up and held it under one arm and tried to get the ironing board to collapse into its flat resting position. But it was arthritic and screeched again and wouldn’t flatten, so Marvalyn had to drop her laundry basket and focus on getting it closed. And Eric’s work shirts and pants spilled onto the floor in a messy clump. Marvalyn grabbed the spilled clothes and chucked them into the basket. They were wrinkle-free. They’d be fine.

And then she refocused her attention on closing the ironing board. It seemed that the only way to get it to collapse fully was to stand it up on its feet, press the lever under the ironing surface to release the legs, and then gently guide it—with gravity’s help—into a flat, closed position on the floor. Which she had finally managed to do. Then she picked up the ironing board and slung it under her arm and turned around to put it back where it lived. As she did so, the flat face of the ironing board walloped something. She didn’t know what. But whatever it was—she had hit it pretty hard. And she turned toward whatever it was she had hit. And saw nothing but a gangly kid—or maybe he was a young man—flopping onto the floor. And she gasped and realized that he was the thing she had hit. She had been so absorbed in her ironing and in her thoughts and in her country music that she was completely unaware that there had been anyone else in the laundry room.

“Oh, no!” she cried, dropping the ironing board and rushing to Steve. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Oh, honey, I didn’t see you, are you okay?!?”

“Yeah,” Steve replied. He hopped to his feet as if nothing had happened and looked for his book of THINGS THAT CAN HURT YOU, which had been sent flying.

“No, you’re not! I smashed you with the ironing board, I wasn’t even looking! Are you hurt?”

“No,” said Steve, having located his THINGS THAT CAN HURT YOU book—which had skittered under one of the clothes-folding tables.