Drycleaners

At the drycleaners I stand in line, my feet shuffling weight from side to side, impatience all over me while the woman, light brown, with her Creole story drones on. In New Orleans none would notice. She’s exotic in Baltimore, a dawn bird everything hears. Even the clerk leans into her tale, clucking softly. When people behind me cough, she won’t be rushed. She’s got her whole story to go. Soon there’s a man she never married, her mother opposed, far away still, and he went into a bar, wrong place, wrong color, wrong words, maybe, a good man. He’ll never come away of there, not comin’ home, geraniums on the back porch, and not replace the bad tire her Honda has, who could always be telling her what time does in the kitchen if she stand half naked letting his dog go on out. So let me pay you for him, give you money because you is nice and I remember, her nearly singing voice sighs. The sleeved pants, two shirts hang on the brass ring, all finished, unclaimed, the stiffened stains gone away. The perfectly starched cloth a redemption so beautiful it might be the linen of royalty, but small for a man two of us will think of as sleep scuffs house walls like tide under a boat. How nice they are, these women doing the little one person can for another which is, in the end, a wash of memorable words that leave you standing.