I glanced at Sabrina. Her arms were still crossed, but she had begun rubbing her thumb against the side of her wedding ring, a habit I’d noticed whenever she was nervous.
“Just the receipt,” I said.
“What receipt?” Sabrina asked sharply.
I pointed toward the corner of the table, where I had placed a small piece of paper beneath an empty detergent bottle to keep it from blowing away when the basement window was open.
Derek reached for it before she could move.
It was a receipt from a laundromat on the other side of town, dated the previous Thursday. There was a handwritten number at the bottom, along with a name that looked like Michael. The paper was wrinkled and faded in places, and I had no idea what it meant.
Derek read it once, then turned it over.
“Michael?” he asked.
Sabrina gave a short, impatient laugh. “Seriously? You’re interrogating me over a receipt?”
“I’m asking who Michael is.”
“He’s someone I know.”
“From where?”
“From work.”
Derek lowered the paper. “You told me everyone in your department was working remotely until November.”
For the first time since she had come downstairs, Sabrina seemed to have difficulty finding something to say. She glanced toward the staircase, where I could hear my grandchildren moving around in the kitchen above us. The sound of their laughter drifted through the floorboards, painfully ordinary against the silence gathering in my laundry room.
“Can we not do this here?” she said.
Derek looked at me, then at the table.
“Mom, would you give us a minute?”
I nodded, although I didn’t particularly appreciate being dismissed from my own basement. Still, whatever explanation Sabrina owed her husband belonged to their marriage, not to me. I had already seen more than I wanted to.
As I turned toward the stairs, Sabrina spoke.
“Marian, you knew exactly what you were doing.”
I stopped with one hand on the railing.
“No,” I said. “I knew I was sorting four bags of laundry that I had already told you I wasn’t going to wash anymore. Whatever else was in those bags was not something I arranged.”
She stared at me, her cheeks flushed.
“You laid everything out like evidence.”
“I laid everything out so each person could take home their own clothes. I wasn’t planning to do your laundry today, Sabrina. That’s the lesson I wanted you to understand.”
Derek looked toward the washing machine.
It was empty.
Only then did he seem to notice that not a single garment had been washed.
“Mom,” he said, “you didn’t do any of it?”
