Every Wednesday I gathered my dirty clothes and lugged them down the condo steps and out to Larry’s car. I hated doing laundry on Wednesday nights because it got in the way of my favorite show, American Idol. Larry could only do laundry night on Wednesdays because he over-committed himself every other night. When I told him no way, that I’d be doing my laundry on Saturdays like the rest of the people do in the town of Elkridge, he got down on one of his scrawny knees and begged me not to leave him alone to face the cockroaches. Of all people’s legs to land on, a cockroach had to land right smack on Larry’s leg one time out of a thousand that he’d visited the laundromat. The ordeal went down like this: Larry sat in one of the hard, plastic orange chairs, reading Jeannette Wall’s memoir, The Glass Castle, when something crawled on him. He looked down at his leg and a big, fat cockroach, with antennae at least an inch long twitching and fluttering about, crawled on him. He jumped up, flung his book and ran out of the laundromat screaming.
