***

In the afternoon Marie pushed a shopping cart with two pillowcases filled with clothes down to the laundry room in the basement. As she wheeled the cart through the cinder-block maze of the basement, she heard the distant drone of the dryers. The minute she had stepped out of the elevator she could tell by the volume of the noise exactly how many of the five big dryers were in use.

The laundry room was deserted except for a twelve-year-old boy reading The Red Badge of Courage and thirty-year-old Jack Cutler, who sat with his legs crossed and hands in his lap staring across the room at the large salmon pink dryers. He sat on one of a connected row of twenty hard plastic sky blue chairs. In the center of the room stood a rectangle of twenty white enamel washing machines. The walls were beige-painted cinder block covered with taped index cards and fliers advertising everything from baby sitters to a starting karate class for women in the community center. The laundry room always gave Marie the blues.

She emptied the pillowcases into a machine, threw in two Salvos and fished around in her pocketbook for quarters. All she found were three dimes and a five-dollar bill. She looked around the room angrily, then approached Jack Cutler. "Honey, do you have change of five?"

Jack jumped up, searched his wallet and his pockets. He had two singles and a fistful of change.

Marie smiled, shrugged and was about to approach the twelve-year-old.

"Wait, here, you need quarters?"

Jack offered her two quarters from his change.

"But I don't have—"

"No... no... it's O.K., I insist." He pressed the money into her hand.

She regarded him curiously. He seemed a little feverish.

"Thanks," she said haltingly. "I'll catch you next time."

"My pleasure." He smiled, almost bowing to her.

Marie used the laundry room on Saturdays and nine times out of ten Jack would be there. At first she thought he was a security guard or a washing machine mechanic, then she figured he was a faggot. Then she decided that he didn't look like a faggot and probably was just some nut who liked to watch women do their laundry, then go upstairs and play with himself or something. Eventually she lost interest in trying to figure out what his game was and regarded him as another washing machine.