The Eighth Inning

The laundromat hummed with industrial comfort, the rhythmic slosh of water in dozens of machines creating a white noise that allowed David to pretend he wasn't forty-two with no laundry schedule at home. He'd come every Tuesday since the divorce, finding something almost meditative about watching his clothes tumble through soap and rinse cycles, the simple mechanical purity of it.

An old man sat two machines down, wearing a faded cap that read 'Brooklyn Dodgers.' He'd been muttering to himself for twenty minutes, and David had been trying not to listen until the old man said, clearly: 'He had a better arm than any of them.' Then: 'Not a person. My dog.' He laughed, a dry rattling sound. 'Buster could field a ground ball better than most third basemen I ever saw.'

David's father had taken him to baseball games every Sunday until the Sunday he didn't—the Sunday after his mother left. They'd sat through three innings in silence before his father stood up and said, 'This isn't working anymore,' and David had thought he meant the game, but he'd meant everything.

The water in his machine stopped, beginning its spin cycle. The old man caught his eye. 'You miss someone when you do laundry?' he asked, and David realized he'd been staring at the man's wedding ring—still on his finger, the finger swollen around it.

'My wife,' David said. 'She's... not gone. Just married to someone else now.'

The old man nodded. 'Buster died six years ago. My wife, she went last winter. Some days I think the dog handled it better than I did.' He reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumbling baseball card, showed it to David. It was a photo of a dog at a ballpark, wearing a tiny jersey, catching a fly ball. '1955. They put it in the paper. People came from three towns over to see him.'

The machine beeped. David stood up to transfer his clothes to the dryer, and when he turned back, the old man was asleep, head tilted against the vibrating machine, the baseball card still clutched in his hand like something that might float away if he let go.

David finished his laundry in silence. At home, he looked up Brooklyn Dodgers, 1955, dog, and found an archived newspaper photo: 'Buster, the fielding canine, and his owner Arthur Levine at Ebbets Field.' The old man's hair was dark, his smile wide, the dog panting happily beside him. David printed it and stuck it to his refrigerator with a magnet, next to his wedding photo, suddenly understanding something about the people we keep holding onto even when they're no longer ours to hold.