The New Owner Of The Coin Laundry Followed Me Into The Parking Lot And Yelled That My Old Dog Made His Business Look “Low Class.” Then A Woman Folding A Sheet Inside Stepped Out Holding A Badge And Asked Him To Say That Again

My name is Eunice Baldridge, and I am seventy years old. I live in Terre Haute, Indiana, in a one-story house I have lived in since 1984. Every Thursday morning I do my laundry at the same coin laundry I have used for eleven years, and I take my dog.

Her name is Midge.

Midge is a small white West Highland terrier. She will be fourteen in January. She has a gray smudge across her muzzle and a careful stiffness in her back end that I notice more than she does. She is healthy. She eats. She steals socks off the bedroom chair, and she still wants to go everywhere I go.

I do not have a working washer at home. Mine died in the spring of 2015, a top-loader that leaked across the linoleum. The repairman wanted $287.00 just to look at it. I told myself I would buy a washer when I retired from the school cafeteria. I retired in 2018. I never bought the washer. By then Thursdays at the coin laundry had become the thing I did.

I like getting out of the house. I like the walk, four blocks if I cut through the alley behind the pharmacy, five if I take the long way past the unused railroad spur. I pull a folding cart with a rusted bottom latch. In the cart I put two pillowcases of clothes, a box of powder detergent I buy for $11.49, a bag of dryer sheets, a paper roll of quarters from the bank, and Midge’s blue towel.

The Deal Burt Made

The old owner was Burt Holleman. He was a wide man with a limp who sat on a stool by the change machine, reading the sports page and drinking coffee from a dented thermos. The first Thursday I brought Midge, it was raining, the cold kind we get here in November, and I stood in the vestibule trying to decide if I should leave her in the car. She was about three then, and she hated rain on her face.

Burt looked at me over the paper.

“She housebroken?” he said.

“Yes.”

“She going to bark?”

“Only if someone knocks.”

He folded the paper once, slowly. “Vestibule is fine in damp weather,” he said. “Not in the washroom. I don’t want hair in the machines and I don’t want anybody complaining they stepped in something. She sits there, you do your wash, we don’t have a problem.”

That was the deal. I never forgot it. I hung her leash on the coat rack in the vestibule and folded her blue towel on the chair closest to the inner door, where I could see her through the glass. She learned the routine faster than I did. She would hop onto the chair, turn twice, and lie down with her chin on the wooden arm. People coming in would say, “Well, hello,” and she would thump her tail and stay put.

She has never gone into the washroom. I want that to be clear, because of what happened later. Not that Thursday, and not any Thursday before it. The vestibule was her spot. The washroom was mine.

The vestibule is a narrow glass box between the parking lot and the machines, two plastic chairs, a bulletin board, a rubber mat that never quite dries, and a smell that is half rain and half fabric softener. Nobody ever made a fuss about Midge. Once a little boy waved at her through the glass and she lifted one paw, which I did not teach her. Burt said, “That’s a better advertisement than I ever paid for,” and went back to the scores.

Burt sold the place in September.

September and a New Owner

I found out the way you find out things at a coin laundry. There was a printed sheet taped to the inner door. UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. Thank you for your business. Please see the attendant with questions.

The attendant was Gage Renfrow.

He was younger than I expected, maybe forty, with close-cut hair and a polo shirt that still had crease marks from the package. He stood by the change machine looking at his phone and frowning, as if the whole room had personally disappointed him.

I said good morning. He nodded without looking up.

The prices had gone up. A wash that had been $2.75 was now $3.50. The dryers still took quarters, but you got six minutes instead of eight. The radio Burt used to keep on the oldies station was gone, replaced by a speaker with a thump I could feel in the folding table. The bulletin board had been stripped, even the card about the lost gray glove.

I did not complain. It was his business. I loaded my usual two machines along the left wall, because they do not walk across the floor as much as the others, and I went back to the vestibule to sit with Midge.

That first Thursday, Gage walked over to the inner door and looked at her through the glass.

“Is that your dog?” he said.

I opened the door a little. “Yes. She’s been sitting out here for years. Burt said it was all right in damp weather, as long as she stayed in the vestibule.”

He looked at Midge. She looked at him and wagged once, polite as a guest.

“We’re doing things differently,” he said. And then he went back to his phone.

The next week he said nothing. The week after that he said nothing. I started to relax, which is a mistake I have made before in my life, though usually about people and not about coin laundries.

There was no posted animal policy. I looked. I looked on the inner door, on the wall above the soap vending machine, on the empty bulletin board that now held nothing except a takeout menu. Nothing about pets. Nothing about the vestibule.

I kept coming.

Mid-Cycle

The Thursday it happened was the second Thursday in October. It had been raining since before dawn, the steady kind that soaks your cuffs and turns the leaves into a slick brown paste. I put on my tan raincoat and packed the cart. I dried Midge with a dish towel at the door, folded her blue towel on the usual chair, and went inside.

I had three loads that week because I had washed the spare bedroom curtains, which I do twice a year whether they need it or not. The curtains filled one machine, my clothes another, the towels a third. That came to $10.50 before the dryers. The wash cycle runs thirty-eight minutes. I have had eleven years to learn that number.

I went back to the vestibule and sat with a paperback I picked up for fifty cents at a library sale. Midge moved her chin onto my knee. Through the inner door I could see my three machines working and a woman at the folding table near the front window, shaking out a white sheet. I did not know her name then.

At minute seventeen, the inner door opened.

Gage stood there. He had his phone in one hand and a set of keys in the other.

“You need to go,” he said.

I looked up from the book. “I’m sorry?”

“The dog. I told you we were doing things differently. I can’t have an animal in here. It makes the place look bad.”

“She’s in the vestibule,” I said. “She has never gone into the washroom. Burt said she could wait out here.”

“Burt doesn’t own it anymore,” he said. “I do. Take her out.”

I sat there for a second with my hand on Midge’s back. The machines were only halfway done. If I left, I would be leaving three loads of wet clothes in machines I had already paid for, including those curtains, which are a trial to iron if they sit wadded up.

“May I wait until the cycle finishes?” I asked. “I’ll sit in the car with her. I just don’t want to leave the clothes.”

“Now,” he said. “I have people coming in. I don’t want them walking past a dog.”

There is a particular way a person says “a dog” when they mean something else. He said it that way.

I picked Midge up. She is heavier than she looks, a solid little barrel of a Westie, and I held her against my raincoat with one arm and got my purse with the other. I left the cart inside by my machines because I thought I would be coming right back to put her in the car and return for the rest of the cycle.

I carried her out through the outer door into the rain. She did not struggle. She tucked her head under my chin, which is what she does when she is not sure what the plan is and has decided to trust me anyway.

Into the Parking Lot

The parking lot is cracked asphalt with weeds in the seams. There were four other cars besides mine, all beaded with rain. I went around a puddle and got my keys out, still holding Midge, who had gone very calm, her whiskers wet, her dark eyes watching my face.

I heard the outer door open again behind me.

I turned. Gage had followed me out. He was not wearing a jacket. The rain spotted his polo shirt right away and made darker circles on his shoulders. He walked toward me with his voice already raised, as if he had been practicing the speech in his head and could not wait to deliver it.

“This is exactly the problem,” he said.

I stood there beside my car. Midge stayed quiet in my arms. She did not growl. She did not squirm. She watched him the way old dogs watch loud people, patient and a little bored.

“I bought this place to improve it,” he said, louder. “Do you understand that? I am trying to run a decent business. And then you show up every Thursday with that dog and a cart full of who knows what, and you sit in my vestibule like this is your living room.”

“I have been coming here for eleven years,” I said. I kept my voice level because someone had to. “I pay for my machines. She stays in the vestibule. There isn’t even a sign about dogs.”

“I don’t need a sign to know what looks low class,” he said.

“Low Class”

He said it again, louder, so that anyone near the glass could have heard it.

“That dog makes my business look low class,” he said. “People drive by and see an old woman and a mutt in the doorway and they keep driving. People like you are why this neighborhood cannot attract better tenants. I am trying to bring this place up, and you are sitting here dragging it right back down.”

People like you.

I am seventy years old. I have been spoken to rudely before. I pay my taxes and I keep my grass cut, and I have never once left a mess in that vestibule. Midge is not dirty. I had towel-dried her twenty minutes earlier. She smelled like the oatmeal shampoo I use on her once a week, the $8.99 bottle from the grocery pet aisle.

“I have worked my whole life,” I said. “I pay my bills. I am not dragging anyone down.”

“Look at yourself,” he said. He gestured at me with the hand that held the keys, a wide sloppy arc that took in my raincoat and Midge against my chest. “This is a business, not a shelter. I want this corner to look like somebody cares about it. And people like you, with your dirty little dog and your quarters and your opinions about Burt, you are the reason the better renters go somewhere else.”

“I will wait in my car,” I said. “When my cycle is finished I will come get my clothes and I won’t come back.”

“Good,” he said. “And you can tell anybody else with an animal that this isn’t that kind of place anymore. I didn’t buy a coin laundry to have it look like some low-class operation with dogs in the doorway. People like you don’t seem to understand what that costs a person who’s trying to build something.”

He was almost shouting by then. My glasses had rain on them. I could feel Midge’s small heartbeat against the inside of my wrist, even and unbothered.

Inside the laundry, faces had turned toward the window.

Including the woman with the sheet.

The Woman With the Badge

She had been folding at the table nearest the big front window, a woman in a dark jacket, methodical, lining up the edges of a white sheet. When Gage started raising his voice she stopped and set the sheet down carefully, as if she did not want to lose her place in the folds.

Then she walked to the outer door and stepped into the parking lot.

She did not hurry and she did not raise her voice. She reached into her jacket, took out a wallet, and from the wallet she slid a badge. She held it up so Gage could see it.

“Sir,” she said. “I’m going to ask you to say that again.”

Gage turned. The rain flattened his polo shirt against his shoulders. He looked at the badge, and then at her face, and then at the badge again.

“Who are you?” he said.

“Inetta Prettyman,” she said. “County environmental health. I am off duty. I am here doing my own laundry, same as this woman. I would like you to repeat what you just said about your customer and her dog.”

That is all she was. She was not his relative, and she had not come there looking for him. She was a county inspector washing a sheet on her morning off, and she had ears, and she had a badge in her pocket, and she used both.

Gage gave a short laugh that did not convince anyone.

“This is private property,” he said. “I can talk to my customers however I want. And that dog is a health issue.”

Inetta looked at Midge, still calm against my coat, and then at the glass vestibule, and then back at Gage.

“Is there a posted animal policy?” she asked.

“I don’t need a posted policy to run my own place.”

“Is there a posted animal policy,” she said again, still even. “On the premises. Where a customer can read it before she pays for a machine.”

He did not answer.

“Did the dog enter the washroom?” she asked.

“She’s been sitting in my vestibule every Thursday.”

“That is not what I asked you. Did the dog enter the washroom today?”

“No,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. “She has never gone in there. I carried her out when he told me to. We were in the vestibule, and then we were out here.”

Inetta nodded once. “A vestibule is not a food-prep surface,” she said to Gage. “You are not operating a restaurant. If you want a no-animal rule, you post it and you apply it evenly. You do not follow a seventy-year-old woman into the rain to shout that she is low class, and you do not invent a health violation while I am standing here with a badge.”

She tipped the badge slightly, enough for what light there was to catch the county seal.

“Say it again,” she said. “The part about people like her. I want to be sure I heard you correctly.”

He Finished My Cycle

Gage’s face had gone a blotchy red. He looked toward the window, where two people had stopped pretending not to watch. He looked at Midge. He looked at the puddle widening around his shoes.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.

“How did you mean it?” Inetta asked.

He did not answer that either.

“Her machines have about twenty minutes left,” Inetta said. “You are going to finish her loads. You are going to dry them. You are not going to charge her for any of it. And then you and I are going to walk back inside and you are going to show me your posted policies, if you have any.”

“You said you were off duty,” Gage said.

“I am,” she said. “I can be on duty in the time it takes me to place a call. I would rather not do that. I would rather you take care of this woman’s clothes and think carefully about how you speak to people in a parking lot that happens to sit in my county.”

He swallowed. “Fine,” he said. “Fine.”

He went back inside without looking at me. We moved under the overhang, and through the glass I watched him transfer the curtains into a dryer, then the clothes, then the towels. He put something in the coin slots. His own quarters, or a key, I could not tell which.

Inetta went back in long enough to finish folding her sheet and walk the walls. When she came out again she had the sheet in a bag against her hip.

“Nothing posted,” she said. “Nothing about animals, nothing about the vestibule. He has a business license in a frame behind the change machine and a fire inspection card that is current. That is all I saw.”

“Will he get in trouble?” I asked.

“Not from me, not today, not for what he said,” she said. “He yelled at a customer about something that is not a code violation. That is ugly. I told him I cover this stretch, and I will notice how he talks to people.”

She held out the back of her hand. Midge sniffed it, licked one knuckle, and then looked away, which is how I know she was herself and not frightened.

“I’ve seen you here,” Inetta said. “Thursdays. I do mine on Thursdays when I can, before the afternoon inspections. Your dog sits on that chair like she pays rent.”

“She thinks she does,” I said.

Gage opened the outer door and stood on the threshold.

“They’re in the dryers,” he said. He spoke to a spot near my forehead. “No charge. You can come in when you’re ready. The dog can wait in the vestibule today.”

“Today,” Inetta said, not quite making it a question.

He hesitated. “Today,” he said, and went back inside.

The Note on the Wall

When the dryers buzzed, Gage folded nothing. He pulled the clothes out in warm wrinkled armloads and stacked them in my cart, which was fine, because I fold at home the way I like it. He did not apologize, not with words. He turned the cart handle toward me and stepped back.

“Thank you,” I said, because my mother raised me a certain way and I have never quite learned how to unset it.

He nodded at the floor.

I walked the long way home, past the railroad spur, because I wanted the extra block. At the house I hung the curtains while they were still a little damp and gave Midge her supper at 4:30, same as always. She ate every bit and claimed the couch cushion she prefers. I heated a can of tomato soup and ate it at the counter.

The next Thursday the rain had stopped. The air was cold and clear, the kind of morning that smells like dry leaves and someone’s dryer vent. I walked the five-block way with the cart and with Midge on her leash, and when I opened the vestibule door I saw it immediately.

A plain index card, taped to the painted wall above the two chairs, written in black marker, no flourish.

Dogs may wait in the vestibule. Please keep them off the washroom floor. Thank you.

No letterhead. No logo. No name signed at the bottom. Just those sentences in an ordinary hand.

Midge hopped onto her chair, turned twice, and lay down with her chin on the wooden arm, exactly as she has done for years. I stood there and read the card twice more, as if the words might rearrange themselves.

Gage was inside by the change machine. He glanced up when I came through the inner door with my pillowcases.

“Morning,” he said.

It cost him something to say it. I could hear the effort. I said morning back. I loaded two machines at $3.50 each and I did not mention the card. I did not mention the parking lot. I measured the powder, started the cycles, and went back out to sit with my dog, under a note that said she was allowed to be exactly where she was.

What Thursdays Look Like Now

That was six weeks ago.

I still go every Thursday. Midge still sits on the blue towel on the chair in the vestibule. The index card is still on the wall. Someone has since pressed the corners down with fresh tape, neater than the first job, as if they decided the original pieces might peel in the damp.

Gage does not follow me into the parking lot. He does not raise his voice. Some Thursdays he even makes change without sighing. I would not call us friends. I would not call us anything except two people who now understand the terms. He runs his business. I wash my clothes. My dog waits where a handwritten card says she may wait.

Inetta was there one Thursday in early November, folding another sheet, the corners matched as carefully as before. She lifted her chin at me through the glass. I lifted mine back. Midge thumped her tail against the chair. That was the whole of the conversation, and it was plenty.

I am seventy years old. I have paid my way in that laundry for eleven years. I am not low class because I bring a small white dog who sits on a towel and bothers no one. A man can raise the wash to $3.50. He cannot talk to me in a parking lot as if I am something to sweep away before the better tenants arrive.

I still wash the blue towel with my own things every week and fold it into the cart on Thursday mornings. Midge hops onto it as if it is a lease she signed years ago. In a way, she did. Burt shook on it over a sports page. A woman with a badge, who owed neither of us anything, made sure it got written down.

If you have ever been told you made a place look like something it shouldn’t, or if you have ever set down what you were folding and walked outside anyway, maybe pass this along. Somewhere a vestibule chair is still being kept warm by a small white dog who has every right to sit there.

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