By late morning the ironing board had gone quiet on purpose. The city iron kept a polite heat and would not slide until the shirt had finished the crease it was still reading. A cuff turned a corner. A pocket lingered. Only then did the plate nod, and the sleeve came away smoother than it had arrived.
We asked at the kiosk by the square, where a neighbor was buying clothespins and a paper cone of cherries. "I used to rush the collar," he said. "Now I wait. The shirt knows which fold is the last sentence. If you press too soon, the hanger looks disappointed, and the button refuses to shine."
The next afternoon the same neighbor came back with a second shirt and stood in the doorway until lunch. By then the whole hallway already knew the pause: the iron nodded first, then the hanger.