Four Shirts

by Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Ray Dunphy had met his mother-in-law once before, in January 1994, on the front step of a two-family house in Perth Amboy. She had told him then that if he ever came back she would have him arrested for murder.

He had not gone back. He had kept that promise for thirty-two years, which was longer than he'd kept most of them.

He did not know it was the same woman until his husband opened the door of Room 4.

Out in the corridor, before that, Hector had taken his wallet out of his back pocket and turned it over twice in his hands and put it away again, the way he did outside every door he didn't want to go through. Then he'd squared his shoulders, which on Hector was an event, because there was six foot three of him and most of it was shoulder.

"She's going to be rude," he said. "She's going to be rude to you specifically. Don't take it personally. She's rude to the chaplain."

"I run a laundromat on the Jersey Shore," Ray said. "People are rude to me for a living."

Hector smiled at that, briefly, and pushed the door.

The room smelled of hand sanitiser and of lilies somebody from her church had sent, which had been put on the windowsill as far from the bed as the room allowed. A television on a bracket was showing The Price Is Right with the sound off. The blanket was the colour of canned peaches. In the bed was a small woman of eighty-one with a white widow's peak and a gold cross on a chain, and Ray stopped walking so suddenly that his sneaker squeaked on the floor.

The widow's peak had been black. She'd had a dish towel over one shoulder. Behind her, on the stairs, there had been a boy in a Giants jersey, eleven or twelve, holding the banister and looking at Ray with enormous interest.

"Ma," Hector said. "This is Ray."

Dolores Ibarra looked at him for a long time. Ray made himself look back.

Hector didn't notice. Hector had spent nineteen years as a nurse in the emergency department at Jersey Shore, and in any room with a sick person in it he did what he always did: the IV, the pump, the bag, the turning chart clipped to the foot of the bed. He did it without seeming to, the way other men check their phones.

"You didn't come to the wedding," Dolores said. To Ray. Her voice was a dry reed.

"No, ma'am. I—"

"I wasn't invited. I'm saying it to him. My son is married nine years, and I meet the husband today."

"Because you told me if I married a man you'd never speak to me again," Hector said pleasantly, smoothing her sheet. "And then you didn't."

"I'm speaking now."

"I noticed." He kissed her forehead. "I'm getting you ice chips. The good ones, from the machine on two, not the slush they've got on this floor. Ray. Sit."

He went. The door sighed shut on its closer.

Dolores waited until she couldn't hear his shoes.

"I know you," she said.

Ray sat, because his legs had made the decision for him.

"The apartment on Sixth Avenue," she said. "Over the shoe store. You came to my house with his ring in an envelope. You think I forget the face of the man who killed my husband?"

"He wasn't your husband by then, Mrs. Ibarra."

"Until the day he died. Nobody divorces in my family. Not then." She moved her hand on the blanket, a small impatient movement, as if she were brushing crumbs. "Does he know?"

Ray did the arithmetic, because arithmetic was easier than the other thing. Hector, forty-four since August. Eleven in 1993. My father died when I was a kid. Pneumonia. Ray had heard that sentence on their second date, and he had said he was sorry, and he had not asked what kind of pneumonia, because in 2015 nobody asked that anymore.

Lenny had called the boy Tito. He'd never once said Hector. Ray had never once asked.

"No," Ray said. "He doesn't know. I didn't know. Not until the door."

She watched him with eyes that had not gone anywhere in thirty-two years.

"They tell me a week," she said. "Maybe less. I have one thing left to give my son, and tomorrow, when he comes, I'm going to give it to him."

"Please," Ray said.

"You took his father. I'm giving him back the truth. That's fair."

The door opened. Hector came in with a styrofoam cup of ice chips and a plastic spoon.

"What's fair?" he said.

Dolores turned her face to the television, where a woman in a sweatshirt was jumping up and down beside a dinette set.

"The prices," she said. "Nothing on this show is fair anymore."

---

Hector drove home. Hector always drove home from anything bad; he said it gave his hands a job. He talked down Route 1 and onto the Parkway about the hospice's staffing ratios, about the chaplain, about whether they should go back tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon, and Ray said yes and uh-huh in roughly the right places and watched the exit signs go by.

Woodbridge. Perth Amboy. Sayreville.

In the fall of 1993 Ray had been twenty-five, a short wide kid from Neptune with a wrestler's neck and a job behind the counter at a Sears, and on Thursday nights and Sunday afternoons he had been a buddy. That was the word the volunteer network used. You were assigned a man, and you were his buddy: you went shopping for him, you sat with him, you picked up his prescriptions in a pharmacy where the pharmacist wore gloves to hand you the bag. When he died you went to a meeting in a church basement in Red Bank, and they gave you another one.

Ray's was Lenny Pacheco. Thirty-four, a bus driver until he couldn't be, third floor over a shoe store that had closed in 1991 and still had a single brown wingtip in the window. Lenny weighed a hundred and twelve pounds by Thanksgiving. He had lesions on his shins he called his freckles. He had a wedding ring he couldn't keep on his finger anymore, so he wore it on a shoelace round his neck, and he did crosswords in pen.

The hospice nurse came three mornings a week. Her name was Bernadette. She was from Galway and had forearms like a stevedore and she counted everything. The morphine came as a concentrate in a small brown bottle with a dropper, and every visit Bernadette held the bottle up to the window and wrote the level on an index card taped to the side of the refrigerator, with the date and her initials, in green ink.

On the second of December Lenny asked him.

He did not make a speech. He'd been working up to it for a week; Ray had seen him working up to it and pretended not to. He just said, "Raymond, I want to go on Friday, and I don't want to do it on my own. I can't hold the dropper steady anymore. Look." He held up his hand, and it was true.

Then he took the shoelace from round his neck and put the ring in Ray's palm.

"For Tito," he said. "When he's old enough to ask about me. Don't give it to her. She'll throw it in the bay."

On Friday night Ray filled the dropper and emptied it under Lenny's tongue, and filled it, and emptied it. "Count out loud," Lenny said. "I like your voice. You sound like a guy who'd fix a carburetor." Ray counted. After a while Lenny stopped saying anything, and Ray held his hand and counted the breaths instead, because he didn't know what else to count, until about four in the morning, when there was nothing left to count at all.

Bernadette came at nine. She looked at Lenny and then at the bottle, and she held the bottle up to the window. She looked at Ray for what felt like a full minute. Then she wrote a number on the index card in green ink, and initialled it, and picked up the phone and called it in as an expected death, which, she said to the man on the other end in a perfectly level voice, it was.

Dolores came on the Monday with a cousin and a station wagon to take Lenny's things. Ray wasn't there. He found out later that she'd stood in the kitchen a long time, reading the card on the refrigerator.

In January he drove to Perth Amboy with the ring in an envelope. He'd written For Tito, from your dad on the front, in capitals, so it wouldn't look like a grown man's handwriting, which made no sense, but he'd been twenty-five.

She opened the door with the dish towel over her shoulder. She looked at the envelope and she looked at him.

"I can read a card on a refrigerator," she said. "I can count. You come back to this house, I call the police, and I tell them what you did."

And behind her on the stairs, the boy in the Giants jersey, holding the banister, looking at Ray as if Ray were the most interesting thing that had happened in that house in a year.

The door closed. Ray stood on the step with the envelope.

He had kept it ever since.

"You're quiet," Hector said, somewhere around Exit 105.

"Long day."

"She was horrible to you. I told you she would be."

"She wasn't so bad," Ray said, and Hector glanced at him from the driver's seat, a quick glance, and looked back at the road.

---

The laundromat was on Main Street in Asbury Park, and at one in the morning it was lit up like an aquarium, because Ray kept it open till two for the restaurant crews and the nurses coming off late shifts. Tonight there was nobody, just one dryer turning over somebody's forgotten load with a sound like a slow heartbeat.

Ray let himself into the back office and unlocked the floor safe. Under the deed and the insurance papers and a roll of quarters from 2004 he had never got round to opening was a White Owl cigar box, and in the cigar box was an envelope gone soft as cloth, and in the envelope was a man's gold wedding band, narrow, worn thin on one side where it had rubbed a steering wheel for twelve years.

Inside it was engraved L & D 6·14·80.

Ray sat on the floor of his office with his back against the safe and held it.

He remembered the first time Hector came in. March 2015, a Tuesday, around eleven at night, in blue scrubs under a parka, carrying a mesh bag with four shirts in it. Four. He used a whole washer for four shirts and then dryer number six, and he sat on the bench by the window with his wallet in his hands, turning it over, and he asked Ray how long he'd had the place.

Since '98, Ray said.

And before that? Had he always been in Asbury? What was it like in the nineties? Did he know a lot of people from back then?

The next Tuesday, four shirts. The Tuesday after that, four shirts. Always dryer six, always the bench, always the questions, which always seemed to be heading somewhere and then turned off at the last exit. It took six weeks for Hector to ask him to dinner, and Ray remembered thinking, when he finally did, that a man who washed four shirts at a time either lived alone very neatly or had been looking for an excuse.

He had been very pleased with himself about that. He'd told the story at their wedding.

He looked at the ring for a while longer. Then he put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the pocket, and turned off the lights in the front, and went home.

---

Hector was at the kitchen table. Nineteen years of nights had wrecked his body clock for good; he was drinking chamomile and doing the Times crossword on his phone, in pen mode, because he said pencil mode was for cowards.

"You went to the shop," he said.

"I need to tell you something," Ray said, "and I need you not to say anything until I've finished, because if you say anything I won't."

Hector put the phone face down.

Ray told him. He told it in the order it happened, because that was the only order he could manage: the network, the third floor on Sixth Avenue, the wingtip in the window, the freckles, the crosswords in pen. He watched Hector's face when he got to the crosswords, and Hector's face did nothing at all. He told him about Bernadette and the brown bottle and the card on the fridge. He told him about Friday night, and counting out loud, and the voice of a guy who'd fix a carburetor. He told him about the step in Perth Amboy and the boy on the stairs.

Then he unbuttoned his pocket and put the ring on the table between them, beside the chamomile.

"I didn't know it was you," he said. "I swear to God, Hec. Not until that door today. She's going to tell you tomorrow. I wanted you to hear it from me first, so at least you'd have heard it from somebody who—" He stopped, because the end of that sentence was loved him, and he did not know if he was allowed to say it in this kitchen anymore. About either of them.

Hector looked at the ring for a long time without touching it.

Then he reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. He turned it over twice in his hands. He opened it, and from behind his driver's licence, behind a folded organ-donor card and a photo-booth strip of the two of them at Ray's sister's fiftieth, he took out a square of lined paper that had been folded and refolded so many times the creases had gone furry.

He unfolded it and turned it round and slid it across the table.

The handwriting was all capitals, a little shaky. It was dated November 1993.

TITO — THIS IS FROM YOUR DAD. A GUY NAMED RAY DUNPHY IS GOING TO HELP ME WHEN IT'S TIME. HE IS 25 AND HE IS SCARED AND HE IS DOING IT BECAUSE I ASKED HIM TO, AND BECAUSE I CAN'T HOLD THE DROPPER. IF ANYBODY EVER TELLS YOU HE DID SOMETHING WRONG, YOU TELL THEM YOUR FATHER SAID HE WAS THE ONLY ONE WHO CAME. WATCH THE GIANTS FOR ME. I LOVE YOU MORE THAN THE BAY. — DAD

Ray read it twice. The second time he couldn't see the end of it.

"She kept it in her missal," Hector said. "I found it in 2014, when Eddie died and we cleared out the house in Woodbridge. Twenty years in a prayer book. I think she couldn't throw it out because it was his writing, and she couldn't give it to me because of what it said." He touched the edge of the paper. "You weren't hard to find. There aren't a lot of Raymond Dunphys in Monmouth County, and only one of them owns a laundromat."

"Four shirts," Ray said.

"I've got thirty shirts. I was rationing." Hector laughed, and it came out wrong, and he put the heel of his hand against one eye. "I had that letter in my pocket every Tuesday for six weeks. I was going to ask you about him. Every week I'd get as far as did you know a lot of people back then, and you'd say something about the change machine, and I'd think, okay, next week. And then one week I thought, if I ask him now, he'll always think that's why I came. He'll never believe I kept coming back for him."

"So you didn't ask."

"So I asked you to dinner instead." He took his hand away from his eye. "And then it was a year. And then it was the wedding. And then it was nine years, and every year it got harder to say by the way, I've known since before our first date that you held my father's hand while he died, because what kind of man sits on that for nine years?"

"The kind who washes four shirts at a time," Ray said.

"Yeah."

They sat. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere down the block a car alarm went off and thought better of it.

"She said you'd taken his father," Ray said, "and she was giving you back the truth."

"She's been giving me that truth since I was nineteen," Hector said. "Every Christmas I came home she'd find a way. That man on Sixth Avenue. She never once said your name. Like it would burn her mouth." He picked up the ring at last and held it to the light over the table and read the inside. "Six fourteen eighty. Flag Day. He used to joke they got married on Flag Day so he'd never forget it, because there'd be flags." He turned it. "You kept this thirty-two years."

"It was the one thing he asked me for that I couldn't do."

Hector put it on. It was too small for his ring finger, so he put it on his right hand, on the little finger, and looked at it there.

"You did it," he said. "It just took a while to get to the right address."

---

At ten the next morning the lilies had been moved again, out into the corridor. Somebody had put the sound on the television, low.

Dolores was awake and propped up, and when she saw Ray come in behind her son her mouth went thin and certain, and Ray understood she had been awake a long time getting ready for this. She had put on lipstick. Her cross was outside her nightgown.

"Hector," she said. "Sit down. I have to tell you something about your father, and about this man."

"Okay, Ma." Hector pulled the chair to the bed and sat, and took her hand in both of his, the way he'd taken a thousand hands in a thousand cubicles, and waited.

She drew a breath to start.

Then she stopped, because she was looking down at her son's hands, and on the little finger of his right hand was a narrow gold band worn thin on one side where it had rubbed a steering wheel for twelve years.

Ray watched her see it. He watched her read it without needing to see the inside. He watched her understand where it had been, and who had kept it, and for how long.

The woman on the television was spinning a big wheel. Nobody looked at it.

Dolores's thumb moved. It found the ring on her son's finger and turned it, slowly, a quarter turn, the way you'd turn a dial to find a station you used to listen to.

"He was a terrible dancer," she said. "Your father. At the wedding, on Smith Street. He stepped on my feet the whole night, and he kept saying sorry, sorry, Dolores, sorry."

"Tell me," Hector said.

She glanced once at Ray. This time he didn't look away, and neither did she.

Then she looked back at the ring and turned it another quarter turn, and began.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Alanō Ginsberg-Cobden per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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