Saint-Zotique, Eleven p.m.

Grey socks, eight pairs, every one of them gone loose at the top so they slide down inside your boots. I keep washing them. I am not going to buy socks.

Across the room a woman is reading The Stranger in English with a highlighter, which is a thing people stop doing after school and she hasn't.

I read it in French at seventeen and remember two sentences.

She catches me looking and does the small closed-mouth smile that means yes, we are both at a laundromat at eleven at night.

I move down two chairs. Not next to her. Two chairs down, which is a proposal.

She's highlighting something in the middle, in the part where nothing happens.

"Do you think love is absurd?"

She asks it exactly like that, out of nowhere, cap still off the highlighter.

"Probably. It's the only absurd thing worth paying for."

She laughs. It's a good laugh, low, and it goes under the sound of the dryers instead of over it.

Her machine finishes first. She loads the bag, caps the highlighter, waves over her shoulder on the way out.

I put another forty minutes on the dryer for clothes that are already dry.