I lifted it off her shoulder as she stepped through the door, one sock, still warm from the machine, and I carried it three streets before I set it down on someone else's step, and neither of them will ever know they touched.
She hugged the whole heap of it against her chest, the towels and the shirts and the small stubborn things, a bundle of everyone she keeps, and she pinned it to the line where I could finally get at it. I love a full line. I filled every sleeve, I made the shirts wave like they wanted to leave with me, I pressed a whole family flat against the sky and let them go, snapping, straining, held only by two wooden bites at the shoulder.
I do not understand the pins. I could have all of it. I could take the whole washed life of them across the field in one good pull.
But she keeps coming back to gather it, arms wide, pulling it out of the air and folding it small, smaller, into that woven mouth of a basket, stacking the warm flat squares of everyone she owns and carrying them back through the wall where I cannot follow.
I got the smell of it, at least. Sun and soap and the particular someone of her, held for a moment, then loosened off my back over the next roof, the next street, gone into a stranger's open window who will breathe her and think only that the day smells clean.
She has already shut the door.
I am three towns over, still carrying somebody's warmth, and I have forgotten whose.