THIS WOMAN’S BEEN SITTING IN THE SAME LAUNDROMAT CORNER FOR MONTHS – BUT YESTERDAY, THE CAT WAS MISSING
I pass her every Tuesday. Same faded green headscarf, same piece of torn cardboard with shaky block letters, same old cat stretched across her legs like something she couldn’t let go of.
People hand her change. Some walk straight past. I’ve always just given a small nod. Kept my distance. There’s something about the two of them together – like that cat is the one thing stopping her from drifting off somewhere no one could reach her.
But yesterday… the cat wasn’t there.
No fur, no slow blinking eyes, not even the cracked orange tag I’d started calling “Chance” in my own head.
The woman
What Her Hands Were Doing Instead
was sitting with her palms flat on her knees. Not holding anything. Not folded, not moving. Just flat. Like she’d forgotten what hands were for.
I almost kept walking. My bag was heavy, I had forty minutes on a wash cycle, and honestly I don’t know this woman. I don’t know her name. I don’t know how she ended up in that corner between the change machine and the bulletin board covered in three-year-old flyers for guitar lessons.
But I stopped.
I don’t know why exactly. Maybe it was the cardboard sign. Because it was still there, propped against the wall beside her, and I could read it now for the first time properly. I’d always sort of glanced past it the way you glance past things you don’t want to look at directly. But standing there with my laundry bag cutting into my shoulder, I read it.
TRAVELING. ANYTHING HELPS. GOD BLESS. CHANCE AND ME.
Chance and me.
I put my bag down on a plastic chair.
“Is he okay?” I asked. Stupid question. I knew before I finished saying it.
She looked up. Her eyes were dry. That was the thing. Completely dry, just very still, like she’d already moved past the part where crying happens.
“He passed in the night,” she said. “Just went quiet.”
She said it the way you say something you’ve already said six or seven times that day, testing whether it gets easier. It doesn’t, and she knew that.
I sat down in the chair next to my bag. I don’t know why I sat down. I had a wash cycle.
The Corner She’d Made for Them
Her name is Dorothea. She told me that about three minutes in, after I asked, because I figured if I was going to sit with her I should know it. Dorothea. She said people mostly called her Dot but she didn’t love it. She said her mother picked the full name because she’d wanted something that sounded like it could belong to a woman with a house and a garden, and she laughed a little when she said that, a short sound, not quite bitter.
She’d been in that laundromat corner since April. Seven months. The owner, a man named Gerald who I’ve said maybe twelve words to total, lets her stay as long as she’s not blocking the machines. She stays in the far corner. She doesn’t block anything.
Chance had been with her for four years. She found him behind a Walgreens in Tucson, skinny and one-eyed, and she said he walked straight up to her boot and sat on it like he was making a decision. She took that as a sign. She kept him.
“He was old when I found him,” she said. “So I never knew exactly. Vet said maybe twelve, thirteen. Could’ve been older.”
She’d had him checked once at a free clinic somewhere in New Mexico. They gave him a dewormer and told her his heart sounded fine. That was two years ago.
“His heart was fine,” she said again. Like she was still working that out.
I didn’t say anything. The machines around us were going. Someone’s jeans tumbling in a dryer, clunk clunk clunk.
The Orange Tag
I asked about the tag. I don’t know why that detail kept snagging at me, the cracked orange tag I’d only ever seen from a distance, but it did.
She reached into the front pocket of her jacket and pulled it out. Set it on her knee.
It was one of those cheap engraved pet ID tags, the kind you get from a kiosk at a pet store. Orange plastic, hexagon-shaped, edges worn white. On one side: CHANCE. On the other side, a phone number I didn’t recognize and two words underneath it.
FIND ME.
I looked at that for a second.
“Whose number?” I asked.
“My daughter’s,” Dorothea said.
She put the tag back in her pocket. Smoothed her jacket over it.
That was all she said about that for a while. And I didn’t push, because there was something in the way she tucked it away, deliberate and careful, that said the tag wasn’t really about the cat finding his way home. The tag was about Dorothea finding her way home. Or being found. Whichever came first.
The cat had been wearing her daughter’s phone number for four years.
What Traveling Actually Means
We sat there through most of my wash cycle. She told me things in pieces, not in order, the way people tell things when they’re not performing a story but just talking.
She’d had a house in Phoenix. Not owned, rented, but a real place with a yard. She’d worked at a hotel doing laundry, industrial machines, ten-hour shifts. Her daughter, Carol, lived forty minutes away in Chandler. They talked on Sundays.
Then a series of things happened that she described quickly and without drama, the way you describe a stretch of road you’d rather not look at: her hours got cut, then eliminated. A boyfriend she shouldn’t have trusted. A landlord who didn’t give much notice. By the time it all fell apart she was fifty-eight years old with a cat, a duffel bag, and a phone that Carol paid the bill on until Dorothea lost it somewhere in Flagstaff.
She’d been moving since then. Not traveling, she said, but she put that word on the sign because it sounded less like what it was.
“What does Carol think you’re doing?” I asked.
Dorothea looked at her hands.
“Carol thinks I’m staying with a friend in Albuquerque,” she said. “I told her that in June.”
June. Five months ago.
“She calls the friend’s number?”
“I gave her a wrong number,” Dorothea said. “By accident at first. Then I just… let it be wrong.”
She said it flat. Not confessing, not asking forgiveness. Just stating the shape of the thing she’d done.
The Reason She Hadn’t Called
I asked the question I probably shouldn’t have asked. “Why not just call her?”
Dorothea didn’t answer right away. The dryers clunked. Gerald came out from the back, looked at us, went back.
“Carol’s got two kids,” she said. “She’s got a husband who works nights. She’s got a mortgage.”
“She’d want to know where you are.”
“She’d want to fix it,” Dorothea said. “There’s a difference.”
I thought about that.
“She’d come get me and I’d be in her house and her kids would be sleeping on the couch and I’d be in their room and every morning I’d sit at her table and watch her pretend that was fine.” She shook her head. “Carol can’t fix this. Carol fixing this would just move the problem to her house.”
“That might be Carol’s call to make,” I said.
She looked at me sideways. Not annoyed. More like she’d already had this argument with herself and she was curious which side I’d land on.
“Maybe,” she said.
She put her hand in her pocket again. Just rested it there, on the tag.
“Chance was the reason I didn’t call,” she said. “I kept thinking, when I find a place that takes animals, then I’ll call. Then it’ll be a better story. I didn’t want to call her with the bad version.”
She stopped.
“Now I don’t have the animal problem anymore,” she said.
She didn’t say it cruel. She said it like someone reading a list and getting to the last item.
What I Did With My Phone Number
My wash cycle finished. I moved the clothes to a dryer. I came back.
I wrote my number on the back of a receipt I found in my coat pocket. I gave it to her. I told her my name. I said if she needed anything, a meal, a phone call, whatever, she could call me.
She folded the receipt and put it in her pocket. She didn’t make a big thing of it.
“You should call Carol,” I said. I couldn’t help it.
“I know,” she said.
“You could use my phone right now if you want.”
She looked at it. Looked at my phone in my hand.
“Not today,” she said.
I picked up my laundry.
At the door I turned around. She was sitting the same way she’d been sitting when I walked in. Palms flat on her knees. But she’d taken the orange tag back out and she was holding it, turning it over in her fingers, not looking at it, just holding it.
I don’t know what she decided.
I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday. I’ll be back next Tuesday. I don’t know if she’ll still be there. I don’t know if she’ll have called or moved on or what. I just know the sign still says CHANCE AND ME and right now there’s only her.
That tag has a phone number on it. It’s been there four years. Maybe the cat was the reason she kept it close without having to use it. Or maybe the cat was just the excuse.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it to someone who’d understand why.
For more stories about unexpected encounters and quiet observations, you might enjoy reading about the old man at the bus depot and his giant plant or perhaps a tale of finding a moment to yourself, like in “I Went to the Bathroom and Cried for Ten Minutes. Nobody Knocked.”.
