No one came to get the clothes that had timed off in the dryer in the building’s laundry. Evelyn didn’t know if it was okay to remove the clothes. She had already waited for fifteen minutes and no one had come.
What was the right amount of time to wait? she wondered. Her boyfriend, Adam, whose apartment she lived in, said – when she called him at work – “Just take out the clothes and put them in a plastic bag with a note.” But Evelyn felt that if these clothes were hers, and she was late picking them up, she wouldn’t want a stranger touching them.
“Okay, well why’d you call me then?” Adam said and they argued.
Evelyn waited longer, but no one came, so eventually she moved the clothes, which were still damp, to a quiet corner spot on the laundry table. By the time her own clothes finished in the dryer, no one came to claim the pile.
She tried to recall the other tenants there when she came down to do laundry. Of the several tenants, none were notable except an old woman sitting in a chair by the bank of washers. The woman wore a red headscarf and had a cane. Evelyn hadn’t really tracked her but the woman, who wore beige gum-soled shoes, may have stepped away while Evelyn was waiting by the washers and scrolling on her phone. What if the woman had fallen down or had some other medical event and been taken to the hospital? In that case, maybe Evelyn should take the pile of clothes with her for safekeeping. But what if the woman had simply left for a nap and overslept and was soon back? She might be upset to find her clothes gone.
###
Evelyn’s call about the unattended laundry and her quandary was just the kind of thing that drove Adam crazy about Evelyn. Why was she so worried about how others felt? She didn’t know any of the tenants in his building, so who cared what they thought? And why did she always ask him his opinion, turning him into some authority figure to whom she must answer? He hated being put in that position.
But more: once she told him about the clothes, he kept picturing the forlorn heap on the table, a symbol of a tenant whose whereabouts were unknown. When he came home from work that evening, he immediately asked Evelyn, “So, what happened with the clothes? Are they still there?”
She told him the story: when she was ready to leave, the clothes were still there, but she was worried about the night cleaning crew breezing in and throwing them out. In which case, the tenant, who might now be holed up in the hospital, would come home to no clothes. To prevent this disaster, Evelyn used a free dryer to finish off drying the damp pile, watching it toss around until the cycle timed off and the clothes were wonderfully warm. After carefully folding them, she put them in a bag with a note to Management explaining the situation and leaving her name and apartment number. “Please see they get to their rightful owner,” she wrote. Then, with a knock on the super’s door, she handed over the bag.
“That was smart,” Adam said. “See? You don’t need me to tell you what to do.”
Evelyn made a face. “Who said I did?”
“Well you called and asked me what to do,” he said and they argued more.
###
Despite her solution, Evelyn was nervous about the outcome. She thought the super seemed shady by the way he poked his head out of the apartment to grab the bag. His forehead was wide and sweaty. Later, in the elevator, Evelyn saw him with his grown daughter, her black hair draped over the purple floral top that Evelyn had folded and put in the pile.
“The super stole the clothes! What a horrible thing to do,” Evelyn told Adam. “What if the lady comes back? She’ll need them.”
They talked about where the lady could be since neither of them had seen her. They asked around every time they were in the elevator with other tenants. No one knew.
“Let it go,” Adam said, but Evelyn stewed. Especially the next time it was laundry day and she went down and saw tenants putting their clothes in the washers and dryers or folding, continuing on with life as if everything was fine. Evelyn wanted a proper ending to the story.
“Some stories are like that. A mystery,” Adam said and they argued some more.
