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I wrote her a ticket for her dress. My hand shook on the C in Cordero. She folded her copy into her purse, thanked me and walked out to a dark car with a man sitting behind the wheel.

I locked the door behind her and stood there until the taillights were gone. I checked the lock twice.

By morning most of my front window was on the floor between the washers. The rest sparkled across the sidewalk, and half of Main Street had come out to look.

Havoc got there just before the sheriff did. He parked at the curb and stood on the sidewalk while I went to hunt for the broom. The sheriff stood there, turning a new page in his notebook.

“You had trouble with anybody, Ava-Rose?”

“No, sir. Probably kids.”

“Kids,” Havoc said with disbelief.

He stepped through the hole where my window used to be, glass cracking under his boots, and picked the cinderblock up off my floor one-handed. He turned it over. The sheriff glanced at the patch on Havoc’s back and kept writing.

“Heavy fucking lifting for kids,” Havoc said.

“They’re big for their age.” I shrugged.

Havoc looked at me. It went on long enough that I started sweeping to give myself something to do and forget how he was looking at me.

I nearly told him. But that woman had called me a woman on her own like it was a diagnosis. If I went running to the club the very next morning, she’d been right about me. A week from Friday I’d say no a second time, and that would be the end of it. No one needed to know, and besides, this was surely just a coincidence. Wasn’t it?

“Kids,” I said again.

He set the block down on my folding table and left. An hour later a prospect from the club garage pulled up with a sheet of plywood and a drill.

“Havoc sent me,” he said, and got to work.

The man came in the next afternoon. He sat down in the chair by dryer three and stayed there.

He had a gym bag between his boots, and he never opened it. Thirties, ball cap, hands on his knees. He watched me. When I folded, he watched me fold. When I went in the back, I could feel him watching the curtain.

“You need change?” I asked him.

“Waiting on a friend.”

Mrs. Delgado, who’d washed her sheets at Bolton’s every week for thirty years, took them out damp and left. A mom with two kids got as far as the door, saw him and turned the stroller around. Havoc’s bike went by out front, slow, and the plywood hid all of it from the street. By late afternoon the man and I were the only people in the building, and I was holding my tailoring shears under the counter while I pretended to do the books.

Around sundown he stood up, stretched and took a slow walk down my row of washers, trailing his hand along the tops of the machines. The door swung shut behind him.

In the morning I found out what he’d done while I was behind my curtain.

Ruben from the road crew had the first load of the day, a week of navy work shirts in number four. When it finished he opened the machine and said, “Ava,” in a voice that brought me around the counter at a run.

The fumes got me from six feet away. His shirts had come out orange in blotches, like somebody had flicked rust at them. I pulled the soap drawer on number four. It was wet to the brim with bleach. So was five. So was six. I went down the whole row yanking drawers, right where that man’s hand had been, and every one of them stung my eyes.

Two more loads were already turning. A set of scrubs and a little girl’s school clothes.

“It’s all right,” Ruben said. “It’s only shirts.”

“It’s sixty dollars of shirts. I’ll compensate you.”

“I’m not taking your money, Ava.”

“Ruben. Take it, please.”

I paid all three of them out of the register until the drawer was mostly air. Then I went in the back, sat down on my box and shook so hard my teeth knocked.