Free Calamity and Other Stories by Daphne Kalotay Page B

checking for toxic garbage. I like this town. They make sure everything is okay.”
    Today is Monday. Sergei stands in Sunshine Cleaners with a cart full of laundry. The tall girl is glowering at him.
    A washer has left her clothes in a sudsy bath instead of rinsed clean. Sergei has again told her, “Not my machine,” but she refuses to budge. So Sergei adds, “Tell the owners,” and points to the telephone number inscribed on a small sign on the wall.
    The girl takes a slow breath. “Fine, then, I’m going to call them.” She heads toward the phone on Lida’s counter.
    “This is our phone,” Sergei tells her, blocking her way with his body. “Not theirs. The laundry is a separate business.”
    The girl raises her hand in an ambiguous half-fist: she could be about to punch him, or she could be about to pull out her own hair. “Then may I use your phone?” she asks, her jaw tightening visibly.
    Sergei pauses for a thoughtful moment before saying, “No.”
    The tall girl looks him in the eye, pushes past him to the counter, and picks up the phone. She dials a number and says angry things to an answering machine. Sergei watches the way her blond hair falls pleasingly forward across her face.
    “This is pitiful,” she says when she hangs up. “This is no way to run a business. You’re rude, and your machines never work. My clothes come back smelling of cigarettes.”
    “So don’t come here,” Sergei says, knowing at once that he does not mean it. Except for Val’s visits, would Sergei even exist here, without the tall girl to notice him?
    “This is the only laundry nearby. I don’t have a car. How can you treat me this way?” The girl has begun crying; this has never happened before.
    “So you don’t have a car,” Lida says from the other side of the room, threading a bobbin on the Singer. “I waited three years for a car. When it came, it was orange and made of plastic. I had to pick it up in Petrozavodsk. I broke the door just getting in to drive it home.” This is all in Russian, so the tall girl does not reply.
    “I need quarters, too,” Sergei is saying. “The owner doesn’t give me a discount. When he comes to take the money from the machines, he doesn’t even talk to me. Do you know how that makes me—? I use the machines just like you.”
    “Well, then, we’re all pathetic,” the girl says through tears.
    Sergei hasn’t stopped talking. “I have to run to the liquor store to change my dollars. If Lida’s not here, I have to lock the door; I have to hurry, and it hurts my back. I have a bad spine, I take quinine at night. I didn’t use to be this way. I was strong, but one day . . .” Sergei hears his voice crack. That’s it. He feels those tears, ready to reveal themselves the minute he blinks. He stops talking and concentrates on not blinking, tries to distract himself by focusing on one of Val’s broken-down computer monitors. The tall girl, without appearing to have heard him, has begun sobbing.
    “Same with the telephone,” Lida is saying, as the sewing machine hums along efficiently. “We lived in that apartment two years before they gave us our phone. Then it didn’t ring. We could only make outgoing calls. People thought we were never home.”
    But Sergei, suddenly exhausted, is not listening, and the tall girl has already gone to the other side of the partition, to sit on a plastic chair and cry.
    Today is Friday. Sergei runs to the liquor store for quarters. He’s thinking about the piece of paper in his pocket. He won’t look at it again yet. Not that he hasn’t already memorized the lines, even looked up one of the words in his English-Russian dictionary. He’ll wait until he has finished one more load, and then he’ll allow himself another glance at the loopy blue handwriting. But first, the quarters. It’s cold inside the liquor store. An unclean man in front of Sergei is buying something called the “Mega Millions.”
    “One hundred and forty-two