Fear and Laundry Read Online Free PDF

did not,” I laughed. “He went for that?”
    She shrugged. “Guess he really is hard up for stuff to do, now he’s back.”
    ***
    W e spent the afternoon listening to music and planning features for the next Blank Slate . Then Lia drove me to the Crawford Hotel to meet my mother for dinner. I told Lia she was welcome to join us, but she shook her head.
    “I wish,” she said, maneuvering the car into the hotel lot. Her parents would be home tonight, she explained, and it was still her week to cook.
    Lia complained about her family’s rotating cooking schedule, but personally, I was glad for it. Regular dinner duty had transformed her into an above average cook and I fully intended to exploit this skill once we graduated in the spring and shared an apartment together. I was useless in the kitchen.
    “Watch it,” I said, as she narrowly avoided clipping a bellhop hurrying by with a luggage cart. “You almost mowed down your boyfriend.”
    Brakes squealing, she pulled up in front of the hotel doors, next to a bright yellow airport shuttle and behind a white limousine.
    “We’ve been through this,” she said, honking at the bellhop. He turned and glared, but then saw it was Lia behind the wheel and smiled. “He’s not my type.”
    “Yeah.” I watched Jonathan Krantz, a guy we went to school with and who’d had a crush on Lia (she’d told me) since kindergarten, push through the hotel’s revolving door and disappear into the lobby. “No pocket protector.” I found her nerd fetish endlessly entertaining.
    She pinched me.
    I was rubbing the sore spot on my arm and calling her names when a car pulled up behind us, the driver honking. “Go on,” Lia shooed me, “get out.”
    I obliged, telling her I wasn’t in the mood to discuss her perversions anyway.
    “Tell Mom I said hi,” she called after me. “And Vee? Try to roll out of bed at a reasonable hour tomorrow? I wanna start rehearsal early.”
    “Yeah, yeah.” I waved as she peeled out and around the limo.
    When I stepped into the lobby, I saw Jonathan again, leaning languidly against the front desk. I didn’t know what Lia’s problem was. He was kind of short, but cute, with dark hair and eyes, and a nice smile. His uniform’s long sleeves hid them, but I’d seen him without a shirt at Lynch’s and knew he had a few tattoos.  And he was in good shape. “Nice driving,” he said as I passed him.
    “What? She didn’t hit you,” I replied.
    “Maybe I’m growing on her,” he said, hopefully.
    I crossed the lobby, bypassing the elevators for a spiral stairwell to the hotel’s basement level, where my mother, the Crawford’s Executive Housekeeper, oversaw a regiment of maids, laundry personnel and maintenance staff that kept the hotel clean and running.
    I reached the bottom of the staircase and went down a narrow hallway where faulty lighting flickered intermittently overhead. The further I traveled, the moister and warmer the air became. I heard the loud, low rumble of industrial-sized dryers and quickened my pace, heading past locked offices and storage closets to the laundry room.
    A familiar voice greeted me when I stepped through the door, and I saw the head laundry attendant, Alma, folding a plush embroidered bath towel into a neat little square. She added it to a stack of identical squares on the folding table beside her just as a dryer beeped, announcing it was done. I grabbed a laundry cart from a row against the wall and wheeled it to the dryer, asking Alma how her day had been.
    She answered it’d been fine and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. Her graying hair was pulled into a loose bun, but her humidity-attacked bangs frizzed out around her face. She frowned at a kitten calendar tacked to the wall. “Is it buffet night already?”
    Once a week, the hotel restaurant served a themed buffet. Sometimes it was all Italian food; other times Mexican, Japanese, or even French. Regardless, my mother and I ate there together