Swept Away by My Janitor Husband novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Room Above the Laundromat

The janitor gives Jean his bed, and by morning she proposes a courthouse wedding so she can walk into the party with a husband; he signs his true name.

Sam lived in one room above a laundromat on Fenner Street.

The whole building smelled like warm dryer sheets, which was the nicest thing about it.

He had a single bed, a hot plate, and a card table with two folding chairs.

His window looked at the back of a pawn shop.

He put my garbage bags along the wall and stood with his hands in his pockets.

"You take the bed," he said.

"I'm not taking your bed," I said.

"I work nights. I'm never in it."

"You're in it right now."

"Then I'll sleep on the floor like a man who can't be told anything," he said. "Take the bed, Jean."

I sat down on the edge of the mattress and the springs sang.

"You got a name besides Sam?" I said.

"Sam Doyle."

"What do you do besides clean buildings?"

He took a long time to answer.

"I'm between things," he said. "Do you want eggs?"

He made eggs on the hot plate in a pan with a loose handle, and he made them well.

I watched his hands.

They were big and clean, and the scar ran along his left forearm in a white line.

I had read once in a trade magazine that Glenn Wexler had gotten it on a loading dock at nineteen, hauling pallets for his grandfather.

The magazine had called him "a man who never forgot where the company started."

The man who never forgot was cracking an egg one-handed over a pan in a room with no curtains.

I did not say a word.

I ate my eggs and decided to find out why.

"Why would a man like you wash floors?" I asked.

"Man like me," he said, amused.

"You carry bags like you've done it your whole life, and you talk like you read."

"I read everything," he said. "Floors have lots of time for it."

"What's the last book?"

"A cookbook, I think. Somebody left it in the sixth-floor trash. It's got a great recipe for brisket."

I laughed, and it felt like cracking a knuckle after a long day.

He smiled back at me, quickly, and then looked at his plate.

I fell asleep sitting up on his bed with my coat on.

He covered me with his own jacket.

I know because I woke at five with the collar against my cheek, smelling of sawdust and soap.

He was asleep on the floor with his head on a folded towel.

Gray light came through the window.

I lay there and thought about Saturday.

I thought about two hundred people in a country club ballroom, my mother in her good navy dress, and Colin's hand on Brooke's back.

I thought about the text.

"Nobody wants you," Colin had written.

I could go and apologize.

I could pay my parents back by working until I was forty.

Or I could walk into that ballroom with a husband.

The idea sat in my head like a stone in a shoe.

I looked at the man on the floor.

I knew he was the CEO of the company that had just thrown me out.

I did not know why he was hiding it.

But I knew he was kind, and that he had put his jacket over me.

And I knew that I wanted, very badly, to find out what he would do if I asked.

At seven I sat up and said, "Sam."

He was awake in half a second.

"I need to ask you something stupid," I said.

"I like stupid."

"Marry me."

He stared at me.

The laundromat's first dryer started up downstairs, thumping.

"Today," I said. "At the courthouse. A real one, no tricks."

"Saturday I want to walk into that party with a husband, and I want Colin to choke on it."

"Jean," he said carefully.

"You don't have to love me. I'm not going to ask you for money. I'll even pay for the license."

"Why me?"

Because you're the only man I know who will never want me for what I can do for him.

I did not say that.

"Because you're the only person who's been kind to me in two days," I said. "And because you can carry eight bags at once."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he started to laugh, low and helpless, with his head down.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. Let me put on a clean shirt."

The Franklin County courthouse had a line out the door at nine, and a clerk with a pencil behind her ear.

We filled out the forms at a long counter.

I wrote my name, my birthday, and my parents' names.

Sam took the pen and paused over the line for his own.

His hand hung there for two full seconds.

I did not look at him.

The clerk coughed.

"Sir?"

He wrote.

Then he slid the paper across the counter, and I read it upside down without meaning to.

Glenn Samuel Wexler.

I put on my best bored face.

"Congratulations," the clerk said, stamping the license. "You can see the judge down the hall."

Glenn looked at me, waiting for me to react.

I smiled up at him.

"Congratulations, Sam," I said.

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