I run a laundromat. I do not run a dating service. I said this eleven times that Friday morning, once to each person on the sidewalk.
It didn't help. They had read the message board.
The post had a headline in capital letters: THE SOCK LEDGER: Is Halsey Avenue Secretly Playing Cupid? It had a photo of Ferris and Odette at the Percolator, taken through the window, slightly blurry. It had forty-one comments. One of them just said finally, a use for my dryer.
"I'd like to lose a sock," said the first woman in line.
"You can't lose a sock on purpose," I said.
"Why not?"
I opened my mouth and found I didn't have an answer. Solveig had never covered this. In thirty-nine years, it had apparently never come up.
"Because then it isn't lost," I said finally. "It's just a sock you're holding."
She looked at the sock she was holding. It was pink, with a cartoon cat on it, and still had a price sticker on the toe. She put it back in her purse with great dignity and left.
Ten to go.
By noon I had invented rules. I wrote them on an index card and taped it to the counter under Solveig's sign.
- The sock must actually be lost.
- The sock must have been washed here.
- No tags, stickers or cardboard.
- The ledger is a registry, not a service.
Tamsin came in for her shift, read the card, and added a fifth rule in pencil. 5. Pippa can tell.
"I can't tell," I said.
"You can now. I'm training you."
She pulled a stool up to the counter and laid out three socks like evidence.
"This one's real. Look at the pilling.
"This one's fake. Washed once, in a sink, by a man who wanted it to look washed. And this one?"
It was a plain white athletic sock, slightly gray at the heel.
"Real?" I guessed.
"It's brand new. He scuffed the heel on the sidewalk."
She shook her head. "Amateur. Two out of ten."
"How do you know all this?"
"I'm an accountant," Tamsin said. "Everybody fakes the receipts."
Silas was replacing a belt on Dryer 4. He watched the whole lesson without comment. Then he said, "You should log the fakes too."
"Why?"
"Chain of custody." He shrugged and went back to the belt. "If you're going to run a registry, run a registry."
It was the most words he had said to me at once in three years. I wrote chain of custody on the back of the index card, because I didn't want to forget it. I also didn't want to think about why.
Most of the new reports were real, which surprised me. It turns out the whole neighborhood had been quietly losing socks for years and just assumed it was normal. It is normal. But now there was a place to write it down.
The ledger went from about forty entries a week to a hundred and ten.
Tamsin built a spreadsheet. I refused to use it. The ledger is paper.
Solveig was very firm about this, and so am I. But I let Tamsin keep the spreadsheet as a backup, the way you let someone keep a spare key.
And the matches kept coming.
Entry 233 was Wallace Kimura's. Wallace was forty-four and ran the butcher shop on the next block. He was built like a filing cabinet with a mustache. He lost one sock in a heavy brown-and-orange stripe, the colors of a tabby cat.
"My mother knitted it," he said. "She's knitted me forty pairs. She can tell from Ohio when one's missing."
The match was Entry 198, found three weeks earlier.
The finder was Rosalind Nkemelu, forty-one, who drives the number 14 bus. She'd found the striped sock clinging to her uniform shirt after a dry cycle. She had logged it with a note: Very warm. Someone loves this person.
The handoff was harder to arrange. Rosalind's shifts didn't line up with the shop's. Wallace's shop closed at six, and her route ran until nine.
"Can she leave it at the counter?" Wallace asked.
I pointed at the inside cover.
He read it, sighed, and said, "Fine. Where's her route go?"
The handoff took place at the Halsey and Ninth bus stop, at 6:22 on a Tuesday. I know because Hector insisted on coming, and Hector insisted on timing it.
"Clear skies," Hector said, squinting up at the overcast sky. "Low chance of rain. High chance of something."
Wallace stood at the stop in a clean apron, holding nothing, looking like a man at a job interview. The 14 pulled up. The doors hissed open. Rosalind leaned out of the driver's seat with the sock in a ziplock bag.
"Entry 233?" she asked.
"Yes, ma'am," said Wallace.
She held out the bag. He took it. They both said thank you at the same time. Then neither of them said anything, and the bus behind them honked.
"I have to go," Rosalind said. "I'm a bus."
"Of course," said Wallace.
The doors started to close. Wallace stepped forward, paid his fare, and got on.
Hector and I watched the 14 pull away. Through the window, I could see Wallace standing near the front, holding the rail with one hand and his sock with the other, talking.
"Where's he going?" I asked.
"The full loop," said Hector, consulting his watch. "Fifty-four minutes. He'll be back at 7:16."
He was back at 7:16. He rode the loop again the next night, and the night after.
On Friday, he brought her a sandwich. On the second Friday, she brought him a scarf she'd knitted from leftover yarn his mother had mailed. It was brown and orange.
Tamsin heard the whole story from me, sunflower seed suspended halfway to her mouth. "Nine," she said. "Nine out of ten. Points off because I wasn't there."
By the end of May, the ledger had produced nine couples.
I didn't call them that. I called them reunited entries.
But the message board called them couples, and so did everyone else. There was a pair of retired piano teachers who now went to the symphony together. Two nurses on opposite shifts had started leaving notes in each other's dryer lint traps. There was a very shy plumber who had reached the stage of holding the door for a very shy librarian every single Thursday.
I didn't arrange any of it. That was the part nobody believed.
"You must have some kind of system," said a man at the counter. He was holding a sock he had very clearly cut in half with scissors.
"The system is socks get lost," I said. "That's the whole system. Also, that's half a sock."
"It's a short sock."
"Rule three," said Tamsin, without looking up from her textbook.
He left. Tamsin logged it in the fakes column. Silas, passing behind the counter with a box of fuses, glanced at the entry and nodded once, as if he approved of the bookkeeping.
Then he stopped at Machine 7, put his palm flat on the lid, and said, quietly, "It's not the machine."
"Nobody said anything about the machine," I said.
"I could hear you thinking it."
I hadn't been. Not exactly. But Entry 1 was still open, and I'd looked at it twice that day. Somehow he knew that, the way he knows when a dryer belt is about to go.
The woman came in on the first Monday of June.
She didn't look like anyone on Halsey Avenue. She wore a cream blazer with no lint on it at all, which in a laundromat is a kind of statement. She was thirty-six, I'd learn later, and carried a tablet in a leather case like it was a hymnal.
She walked straight past the folding tables and the change machine and Hector's newspaper. She stopped at the counter and smiled at me. It was a very good smile. It looked like it had been tested on focus groups.
"Pippa Lindgren?" she said. "Sloane Kovach. VP of Growth at Pairly."
I knew Pairly. Everyone knew Pairly. It was the dating app on the side of every bus in the city, including Rosalind's.
"I'm here," said Sloane, "about your algorithm."
"I don't have an algorithm."
Her smile widened, which I hadn't thought was possible.
"Then you're going to love what we have," she said.
Up next: The Algorithm
Continue to Part 3 →