I'm Rosanna, forty-seven years old, and for the past three months I've carried a yellow plastic folder in my purse holding the paperwork for my laundromat on Kedzie Avenue, in the Marquette Park neighborhood of Chicago. Inside is the lease for the storefront, the transfer of ownership signed in front of a notary public, and a bank receipt for twenty-four thousand dollars. I want to explain how I got here, because this wasn't a decision I made on a whim one random morning.
My husband Frank left me for a coworker from the post office last year, in February, while snow was coming down outside — one of those rare Chicago snowfalls that lasts a day and then turns into gray slush on the sidewalks. He was fifty-three, I was forty-six. Twenty-three years together, one son, Danny, who's now studying engineering at Purdue and calls me every Sunday evening, always at eight, like clockwork.
When Frank left, I found out two things in the same afternoon, sitting at the kitchen table with my sister Carla: that he'd been seeing someone for two years, and that the laundromat — the one we'd opened together back in 2009, with both our savings and a loan from the credit union — was in his name only. I'd worked there every afternoon for fifteen years. I knew every customer by name, knew who dropped off sheets on Tuesdays and who came Thursdays, knew that Mr. Brennan from the apartments on 63rd always left loose change in his pants pockets and I'd hand it back to him in a little paper cup. That laundromat smelled like fabric softener and hot iron steam, and it was as much home to me as the apartment where I slept.
Frank told me, sitting on the couch still in his coat, that "for tax reasons" the business had stayed in his name, and that he wanted to sell it now to fund his new life in Milwaukee with Denise. He offered me three thousand dollars, "out of gratitude," those were his exact words. Three thousand dollars for fifteen years spent behind that counter.
I nodded that night. I didn't say no, didn't yell, didn't break anything. I went back to my sister's place, sat on her back porch overlooking the alley, listened to the neighbor's TV playing the ten o'clock news, and thought about how I was forty-six years old with hands that could still get a stain out of a shirt collar better than anyone else in that whole neighborhood.
The next day I went to see Attorney Deluca, on Cicero Avenue, the one who'd handled Carla's divorce three years earlier. I brought him everything: the laundromat's bank statements going back to 2009, receipts for supplies I'd paid for with my own debit card, the photos I'd taken over the years for the shop's Facebook page — always me in them, never him. He told me something that stuck with me: "You worked fifteen years without a contract in what amounts to a marital business. That carries weight in court, if you can prove it."
It took eight months. Frank tried to sell the laundromat under the table to an acquaintance in January, while the divorce proceedings over marital property were still open. The buyer, a guy named Sal who already ran two laundromats in Cicero, backed out the moment he found out there was a pending lawsuit — nobody wants to buy into litigation.
In March the judge ruled that the laundromat counted as marital property, despite the ownership paperwork, because I'd proven through bank records and customer testimony — yes, I brought Mr. Brennan to court, seventy-one years old, and he stood there straight-backed in his Sunday sport coat and told the judge that "Rosanna was the laundromat, the other one showed up maybe once a month" — that I was the one actually running the business.
On June fifteenth I signed the settlement: the laundromat passed to me, in exchange for giving up my share of Frank's pension. The notary, Ms. Whitfield, handed me the copy of the document in a blue folder and just said "congratulations, ma'am" — nothing more, but I heard that word like applause.
Frank showed up at the shop two weeks later, a Tuesday, around six in the evening, while I was pulling down the security gate. He had the look of a man who didn't expect to find me still there with the keys in my hand.
"I heard you changed the lock on the back door too," he said.
"Yep," I said, not stopping the gate. "And I changed the name on the sign. It's not 'Conti Coin Laundry' anymore. Now it's 'Rosanna's Laundromat.'"
He stood there on the sidewalk, hands shoved in his jacket pockets, while I finished locking up. I didn't offer any explanations, didn't owe him any. I clicked the padlock shut, tugged it twice to check it caught, the way I always do, and headed for the bus stop for the 47 route that gets me home in twelve minutes.
The laundromat's bank account is in my name alone now. The twenty-four thousand dollars in buyout money I paid him for his share came from a loan I'm paying off over seven years — a payment I know by heart, three hundred forty dollars a month, due on the fourth. Danny told me, last Sunday on the phone, that he's proud of me. I told him he didn't need to say it, that all he had to do was see me on a Saturday morning behind that counter, sleeves rolled up, working a collar stain that nobody else could save.
