Picking Up

I stride out from between the cars, only to pull up short with a little hop as a car I didn’t see buzzes past. I watch it go, then, after checking both ways, dart across the street to the Chinese laundry.

When I come in, Judy looks up from the table where she’s stapling little yellow tags with Chinese characters onto clean clothes and gives me a smile. I hand her my ticket, and she and her husband look around for a little while, until she laughs and pulls my laundry from the bottom of a pile, saying, “I forget you have a different bag!"