Ida, however, was not made for subtlety.
“Ha!” The sound came out bright and sharp, bouncing off the tile walls and the metal machines and the sleeping man across the room, who startled awake and knocked his hat off. “I knew that woman had debtor energy. The way she haggles at the?—”
Every head in the laundromat swiveled toward them.
The sleeping man stared. A teenage girl on her phone looked up. A woman folding towels near the door stopped mid-fold.
Ruth’s spine went rigid.
Nans turned to Helen and said, in a carrying, exasperated voice, “I told you this blouse could not go in hot water.”
Helen, God bless her, didn’t miss a beat. “I followed the label exactly.”
“The label says cool. You said ‘close enough.’”
“I said slightly warm.”
“It’s pink, Helen. It was white this morning.”
Lexy pressed her hand flat against her mouth to keep from laughing.
The woman with the towels went back to folding. The teenager lost interest. The sleeping man found his hat and settled back in.
Behind the newspaper, barely audible over the dryers: “Amateurs.”
Ruth waited a full thirty seconds before speaking again. “Can you flag it if the unit goes to auction? Before the notice goes public?”
“I can do that.”
“And if anyone brings in a cat?—”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll be in touch.”
Another pause. The newspaper folded with the crisp efficiency of a man declaring a meeting adjourned.
“If anyone asks,” Mickey said, “I’ve never seen any of you in my life.”
Ida turned just slightly toward the wall. “That stings, Mickey. I feel like we’ve really connected today.”
“Take your bleach and go.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Nans’ dining room table had disappeared under a spread of Cup and Cake pastries which consisted of a plate of lemon bars, half a dozen snickerdoodles, two slices of crumb cake, and a small mountain of eclairs that Lexy had pulled from the display case before they left. The coffee had been refilled twice. Ruth was uncapping a marker at the whiteboard with the focused expression of a woman who believed that a clean column header could solve most problems.
Ida was eating a snickerdoodle.
Lexy sat at the table with her second coffee and her third yawn, trying to get her brain to file the last twelve hours into something that made sense. Laundromat. Mickey. Tina. Two payments behind. Storage units. Cat.
“Can we start?” she asked.
“Ruth’s still writing the headers,” Nans said.
“The headers are four words, shouldn’t take this long,” Lexy said.
“Four important words.”
Lexy’s phone buzzed.