All the Quarters We Had

July eleventh. My building's laundry machine decided last Saturday was a good time to stop working mid-cycle, which is how I ended up at the laundromat on a ninety-degree afternoon with two garbage bags of wet clothes and a very limited supply of quarters.

Simone came. I didn't ask her to, I mentioned it at the end of a shift the way you mention a mildly bad thing that's about to happen, and she said what time, so. We were there for two hours. We used almost every quarter both of us had between us, including the ones at the bottom of her bag that turned out to be Canadian, which the machine declined to acknowledge.

At some point we got to the folding and I ran out of any remaining efficiency. Simone watched me wrestle a fitted sheet for about forty-five seconds before she said something I won't repeat here that made me laugh hard enough to put the sheet down entirely. The thing about doing a chore with someone else is that the chore doesn't actually get easier, but the version of yourself doing it gets a little better.

The folding portion of the afternoon, which neither of us planned for.

I got home, put everything away, and found one more quarter in the bottom of one of the bags. I put it on the kitchen counter next to Gerald, who looked, as always, improbably fine. Two sentences is about all that afternoon needs. It was a good afternoon.

Quarters. We needed more of them.