IT ALL DEPENDS on the conditions of the wash. On the twentieth wash in hot water with a strong detergent, a delicate shirt is known to split at the seams. However, mix the same shirt in with cool water and the proper cycle, and the shirt can last five times as long. A miracle of modern fabric technology. And to think, women used to blanch their hands with lye. Shelly picked the pills from a sweatshirt she had washed five times that morning. She didn’t look at the back of the shirt, which had three slashes across the upper part that almost looked like they could have come from aggressive moths. The fabric felt slick, as if there had been too much detergent building up. She made a note to run it through a cold-water wash without chemicals, to clear everything out. The regular crowd worked silently in the laundromat. A young woman corralled kids out of rolling baskets and toward the pinball machine. Two college kids, a boy and a girl, paged through thick anatomy texts while waiting on their individual spin cycles.
