Tuesday again. The woman pushed through the door at 4:15, same as always. Linh looked up from the pressing machine, steam hissing around her face. The blue dress hung over the woman's arm like something dead.
"Hello, Mrs. Dolores," Linh said, setting down the iron.
Dolores placed the dress on the counter. Same wine stain over the left breast, dark as a bruise against the powder blue fabric. Fifth time in five weeks.
"Can you get it out?" Dolores asked, though they both knew the answer.
"I try again," Linh said, writing up the ticket. She didn't mention that the stain hadn't been there when she'd returned the dress last Tuesday. Or the Tuesday before that.
Dolores's fingers trembled as she took the claim ticket. Her wedding ring caught the fluorescent light—a small diamond, the gold worn thin.
"Thursday okay?" Linh asked.
"Thursday's fine."
After Dolores left, Linh held the dress up to the light. The fabric smelled of White Shoulders perfume and something else—mothballs maybe, or just the mustiness of a house where the windows stayed shut. The stain was always exactly the same size, same location. Like someone had practiced making it.
Marcus was grading papers at the kitchen table when Linh got home. Red pen marks covered the student essays like small wounds.
"Long day?" he asked without looking up.
She set her purse on the counter, started pulling things from the refrigerator for dinner. Ginger, lemongrass, fish sauce. The smell of the lemongrass always made her think of her mother's kitchen in Saigon, the blue plastic stools around the low table, her sister Thuy chopping vegetables with quick, precise movements.
"That woman came again," she said. "With the dress."
"The blue one?"
"Yes."
Marcus looked up then, studied her face. After twelve years of marriage, he knew when something was bothering her, even if she couldn't say what.
"Maybe she just likes having it cleaned," he said.
"The stain is always new. Same place, but new."
"That's strange."
Linh sliced the lemongrass, the blade making soft sounds against the cutting board. "She does it herself. The stain."
"Why would someone do that?"
She didn't answer because she didn't know how to explain it in English, this thing about holding onto hurt like it was all you had left. In Vietnamese, there were words for this kind of sorrow, but they didn't translate right. They came out sounding either too simple or too dramatic.
That night, Linh lay awake thinking about the dress. She imagined Dolores at home, carefully pouring wine onto the fabric, watching it spread. In the morning, she would hang it up to dry, and on Tuesday, she would bring it in again.
Thursday came. Dolores arrived at 4:00, fifteen minutes early. She stood at the counter while Linh retrieved the dress from the back, wrapped in plastic that whispered when she moved it.
"Look very nice," Linh said, though they both knew the routine.
Dolores paid in exact change, coins warm from her pocket. As she turned to leave, she paused.
"It was our anniversary dinner," she said suddenly. "Forty years ago next month. He ordered the wine. A Malbec. I'd never had Malbec before."
Linh waited.
"He left that night. After dinner. Just... left. Said he'd been seeing someone else. Someone from his office." Dolores's voice was flat, like she was reading from a grocery list. "I threw my wine at him, but he'd already turned away. It hit the wall instead. Got all over my dress."
The shop felt very quiet. Outside, a bus rumbled past.
"I'm sorry," Linh said.
Dolores smiled, a small, tired movement of her lips. "The stain came out, you know. The first time. Your predecessor—Mr. Park—he got it all out. Good as new."
She left with the dress. Linh watched her through the window, walking slowly toward the bus stop, the plastic-wrapped dress held carefully in both arms.
That night, Linh called her sister in Saigon. It was morning there, and she could hear the street vendors calling out, the motorbikes honking. Thuy's voice sounded tired.
"The money came through," Thuy said. "Thank you."
"How is your back?"
"Better. The doctor says the new medication is helping."
They talked about small things—the weather, their mother's garden, a cousin's new baby. Neither mentioned that it had been fifteen years since Linh left, or that she'd promised to visit soon for the last ten of those years.
After she hung up, Marcus found her sitting in the dark living room.
"You okay?"
"I should go see her," Linh said.
"Your sister?"
"Yes."
"Then go."
"It's not so simple."
He sat beside her, not touching, but close enough that she could feel his warmth. "Why not?"
How could she explain that going back meant admitting she'd become someone else? That the girl who'd left Saigon on a student visa, promising to return after university, had disappeared somewhere between Portland winters and English conversations and a life built around other people's dirty clothes?
"I don't know who I am there anymore," she said finally.
Marcus was quiet for a moment. "Maybe that's okay."
The next Tuesday, Dolores didn't come. Linh found herself watching the door, checking the clock. 4:15 passed. Then 4:30. At 5:00, she started to worry.
Wednesday morning, she looked up Dolores's address in the customer database. It was wrong, she told herself, to intrude like this. But she went anyway, after work, taking the bus across town to a neighborhood of old craftsman houses with overgrown yards.
Dolores's house was painted green, the color fading and peeling in places. The lawn needed cutting. Linh stood on the sidewalk for a moment, then walked up the cracked concrete path and knocked.
Dolores answered in a housecoat, her gray hair uncombed.
"Linh?" She seemed confused, like she couldn't place her outside the context of the dry cleaning shop.
"I was worried. You didn't come yesterday."
"Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize... Would you like to come in?"
The house smelled of coffee and old newspapers. The living room was tidy but frozen in time—brown furniture, orange carpet, a console television that probably hadn't worked in years. On the mantle, a wedding photo: young Dolores in the blue dress, smiling beside a thin man with dark hair.
"Would you like some tea?" Dolores asked.
"Yes, thank you."
In the kitchen, Linh noticed the table was set for two. Two plates, two sets of silverware, two glasses. One place had been used, the other untouched.
"I do this sometimes," Dolores said, seeing her looking. "Set his place. Silly, I know."
"Not silly."
Dolores filled the kettle, her movements careful and deliberate. "He's been gone longer than we were together. Isn't that strange? The leaving lasts longer than the having."
Linh thought of her sister's voice on the phone, the street sounds of Saigon in the background. "Yes," she said.
They drank their tea in silence. The blue dress hung in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, clean and pressed, no stain in sight.
"I didn't put the wine on it this week," Dolores said finally. "I started to, and then I thought... what's the point? He's not coming back. The stain won't bring him back."
"No."
"But without it, without the routine of it, I don't know what to do with Tuesdays."
Linh set down her cup. "Maybe something else. Something new."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Maybe just... different dress. Different day."
Dolores laughed, a sound like rustling paper. "A different dress. I hadn't thought of that."
On the bus home, Linh made a decision. She called Marcus.
"I want to book a flight," she said. "To Saigon."
"When?"
"Next month. For two weeks."
"Okay."
"I might not recognize it. The city. It's probably all different now."
"Probably."
"My sister might be different too. We might not have anything to talk about."
"Maybe. But you'll go anyway."
"Yes."
That night, she dreamed of the blue dress, but it wasn't stained. It hung on a line in her mother's courtyard in Saigon, moving in the warm breeze, the color bright against the white walls. Her sister was there, older now, gray threading through her hair, but her hands still moved with the same quick precision, hanging laundry, pulling it down, hanging it again.
The next Tuesday, Dolores came in with three dresses—a green one with buttons like shells, a black one with lace at the collar, a red one that looked like it had never been worn.
"Spring cleaning," she said, but her eyes were bright, alive in a way Linh hadn't seen before.
"Good colors for you," Linh said, writing up the tickets.
"The blue one's at Goodwill. Someone else can worry about it now."
After Dolores left, Linh stood at the window watching her walk to the bus stop. She moved differently, her shoulders straighter, her pace quicker.
The phone rang. A man wanting to know if they could get motor oil out of a suit jacket. Linh told him they could try. They could always try. That was the business they were in—trying to remove stains, to make things clean again, even when everyone knew some marks went too deep to ever really disappear.
But you had to try anyway. You had to keep bringing things in, laying them on the counter, asking if this time might be different. Or you had to stop bringing them in altogether, leave them at Goodwill, let someone else decide what to do with the damage.
Marcus came by at lunch, bringing Vietnamese sandwiches from the place she liked on 82nd Avenue.
"I looked at flights," he said. "There's a good deal if we book this week."
"We?"
"You didn't think I'd let you go alone, did you? I've always wanted to see where you grew up."
She looked at him, this man who'd been trying to understand her silences for twelve years, who graded papers with a red pen while she cooked with lemongrass and fish sauce, building a bridge between their worlds one meal at a time.
"It will be hot," she said. "And humid. And the traffic is crazy."
"I know."
"My family will ask too many questions. About why we don't have children. About when we're moving back. About everything."
"I know that too."
She unwrapped her sandwich, the smell of cilantro and pickled vegetables filling the small break room behind the shop. "Okay," she said.
That afternoon, she pressed shirts and thought about airplane tickets, about her sister's voice on the phone, about Dolores's blue dress hanging in someone else's closet now. The steam from the press rose around her face, and for a moment, she could almost smell the pho shops on Le Loi Street, hear the cyclo drivers calling for passengers, feel the Saigon heat that pressed down like a living thing.
A customer came in with a wedding dress, yellowed with age.
"It was my mother's," the woman said. "I'm getting married next month. Can you clean it?"
Linh examined the fabric, the delicate beadwork, the small stains along the hem where it had dragged on some long-ago dance floor.
"I can try," she said.
The woman smiled. "That's all I'm asking."
After she left, Linh hung the dress in the back, next to the suits and coats and all the other garments people brought in, hoping to make them new again, or at least new enough to wear one more time.
She thought about calling her sister again, telling her about the tickets, but decided to wait. There would be time for that. For now, it was enough to know she was going, that in a month she would stand in her mother's kitchen, that particular light coming through the windows, that specific sound of home filling her ears.
The next customer brought in a leather jacket with paint stains. Then someone with coffee on a silk blouse. Then mud on wool pants. Each stain with its own story, its own reason for being there. Some would come out easily. Others would take work. A few would never fully disappear, would always leave a shadow on the fabric, a reminder of what had happened.
But that was okay too. The shadows were part of the story, part of what made each piece unique. You couldn't always remove them, but you could learn to live with them, could learn to wear them like they belonged there, like they were meant to be part of the pattern all along.
Thursday came again. Dolores arrived at exactly 4:00 to pick up her dresses. She was wearing lipstick, a bright coral color that made her look younger.
"Going somewhere special?" Linh asked.
"Book club," Dolores said. "First time. My neighbor's been asking me to join for years."
"Good for you."
Dolores paid, then hesitated. "That blue dress," she said. "For forty years, I wore it every Tuesday. Put the stain on it every Monday night. Like a ritual, you know? Like if I kept doing it, kept reliving that night, maybe it would end differently."
"But it never does."
"No. It never does." She picked up her dresses, the plastic rustling. "Your English has gotten better. Since you started here."
Linh smiled. "Five years now."
"Where are you from? Originally?"
"Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City now."
"Do you miss it?"
"Every day."
Dolores nodded like she understood. "The missing doesn't go away, does it? It just... changes shape."
"Yes."
"But that's not always bad."
"No. Not always."
After Dolores left, Linh stood at the window watching the street. Rush hour traffic was building, people heading home from work, to their families, their dinners, their evening routines. Somewhere across the ocean, her sister was waking up, starting her day. The money Linh sent would pay for her medication, for the doctor visits, for the things that kept her going. But it wouldn't bring back the years they'd lost, wouldn't erase the distance between them.
That was okay too. They would find new ways to be sisters, new ways to share their lives across the miles and years. It wouldn't be what they'd planned when they were young, when they'd promised to live near each other forever, to raise their children together, to grow old in the same city where they'd grown up.
But it would be something. It would be real. It would be theirs.
The last customer of the day brought in a child's communion dress, white as fresh paper, with just a small grass stain on the hem. An easy fix. Linh wrote up the ticket, promised it for Monday.
After closing, she walked to the bus stop instead of calling Marcus for a ride. The evening air was cool, smelling of rain coming. She thought about Dolores at her book club, wearing one of her newly cleaned dresses, talking about whatever book they'd chosen. She thought about the blue dress in Goodwill, waiting for someone else to find it, to make it part of their own story.
At home, Marcus was in the kitchen, attempting to cook pho from a recipe he'd found online. The smell was wrong—too much star anise, not enough fish sauce—but he was trying.
"How was your day?" he asked.
"Good," she said, and meant it.
She took over the cooking, adjusting the broth, adding what was missing. They ate together at the small table, the windows fogged from the steam. Outside, the rain started, gentle at first, then harder.
"I want to learn Vietnamese," Marcus said suddenly.
"Why?"
"So I can talk to your family. When we visit."
"It's a hard language."
"I know."
She looked at him across the table, this man who was willing to stumble through tones and unfamiliar sounds just to be able to say hello to her mother, to thank her sister for dinner, to be less foreign in the place she came from.
"Okay," she said. "I'll teach you."
They started that night with simple words. Hello: xin chào. Thank you: cảm ơn. I'm sorry: xin lỗi. His pronunciation was terrible, but he kept trying, laughing at his mistakes, trying again.
Later, in bed, she told him about Dolores giving away the blue dress.
"That must have been hard," he said.
"I think it was time."
"Yeah."
She lay quiet for a moment, listening to the rain against the windows. "I'm scared to go back."
"To Vietnam?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"What if I don't belong there anymore? What if I'm too American now?"
Marcus turned to face her in the dark. "You belong wherever you are. That's how belonging works. You make it happen."
She wanted to argue, to explain that it wasn't that simple, but maybe it was. Maybe belonging wasn't about fitting perfectly into a place but about accepting that you'd never fit perfectly anywhere, and that was okay. You could belong in multiple places, in multiple ways, carrying all of them with you like overlapping patterns on fabric.
The rain continued through the night. She dreamed of Saigon in the monsoon season, water flooding the streets, everyone moving through it like it was normal, because it was. Her sister was there, laughing at something, her face younger, before the back problems, before the years of distance. They were sharing a bowl of bún bò, the spicy beef soup their mother made on Sundays, and everything was exactly as it had been and completely different at the same time.
She woke to sunlight and the sound of Marcus in the shower, singing off-key in Vietnamese, the words all wrong but the effort pure. She lay there for a moment, thinking about the day ahead—the clothes waiting to be cleaned, the stains to be removed or accepted, the customers with their stories of damage and hope.
Then she got up and started her day, moving through the familiar routine that had become her life here, in this city that wasn't home but was, with this man who didn't speak her first language but understood her silences, with work that was just cleaning clothes but was also about trying to fix what could be fixed and accepting what couldn't.
The blue dress was gone, but its ghost remained in the computer system, in the memory of repeated Tuesdays, in the understanding that had passed between two women who knew what it meant to hold onto something too long. And now it was out there somewhere, in someone else's closet, waiting to become part of a different story, a different kind of Tuesday, a different way of moving through the world.
That was the thing about stains, Linh thought as she stood at the pressing machine, steam rising around her face. They marked a moment, a mistake, a memory. You could try to remove them, and sometimes you succeeded. But even when you did, you remembered they'd been there. The fabric remembered. And maybe that was enough—to know that something had happened, that it had mattered, that it had left its mark, even if no one else could see it anymore.
The door chimed. A new customer with a new stain, a new story, a new chance to try to make something clean again. Linh looked up, ready to help, ready to try, ready to be part of the endless cycle of damage and repair that made up a life, that made up all their lives, here in this shop, in this city, in this world where everyone was trying to clean up their messes, one Tuesday at a time.