“Get away from my kids. I don’t want whatever you’ve got.” The woman said it loud enough for the whole stop to hear.
I had three hours before my shift and nowhere to be. I was sitting on the bench when the man sat down at the far end – quiet, keeping to himself, a grocery bag between his feet.
The woman with the double stroller hadn’t even looked at him before she said it.
He didn’t respond. Just moved his bag a little closer to his feet.
“Excuse me,” I said. “He wasn’t near your kids.”
“Stay out of it,” she said.
I’m a nurse. I’ve watched people talk to patients like they’re not in the room – like being sick or poor makes you invisible. I know that voice. I’ve used it myself, once, years ago, and I’ve never forgiven myself for it.
The man’s name was Curtis. Sixty-something, boots held together with electrical tape.
He said, “It’s fine, miss. I’m used to it.”
That’s what broke something in me.
I asked him where he was headed. He said the shelter on Deering had a lunch window that closed at one. I checked my phone. It was 12:41.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll drive you.”
The woman made a sound behind us. I didn’t turn around.
In the car, Curtis told me he’d been a machinist for thirty years. Laid off at 58, wife passed at 60, apartment gone at 61. He said it the way people say the weather – like facts, not complaints.
I had to grip the steering wheel to keep from saying something I couldn’t take back.
We pulled up to the shelter and a man at the door recognized Curtis. Called out to him.
“Curtis! You brought someone?”
Curtis looked at me and said, “This is the nurse who didn’t look away.”
I handed him my card. I don’t know why. It just felt like the wrong time to say goodbye.
He looked at it for a long moment, then looked up.
“My daughter works at your hospital,” he said. “Her name is Donna Fitch. She’s been looking for me for TWO YEARS.”
The Thing About That Voice
I need to back up for a second. Because the woman at the bus stop matters to this story, even though she’d hate knowing that.
I’ve heard that voice maybe a thousand times. It shows up in triage when someone comes in smelling like they haven’t had a shower in a week. It shows up in waiting rooms, in elevator banks, in parking garages at 6 a.m. It’s not always loud. Sometimes it’s just a look, or the way a body turns slightly away, creating a few extra inches of distance that the other person absolutely notices.
I used it once. I was a second-year nursing student, exhausted, and there was a man in the hallway of the teaching hospital who was clearly homeless and clearly confused about where he was. I didn’t say anything cruel. I just walked past him like he was furniture. Didn’t make eye contact. Kept moving.
My supervising nurse saw me do it. She didn’t say anything until the end of the shift. Then she sat down across from me in the break room and said, “He had a name. Gerald. He was a retired electrician. His son had just brought him in because he’d had a stroke.”
She didn’t lecture me. She just said it, and then she got up and refilled her coffee.
I’ve thought about Gerald maybe three hundred times since then. I don’t know what happened to him. I never asked.
What “I’m Used to It” Actually Means
When Curtis said it, it’s fine, miss, I’m used to it, he wasn’t being gracious.
He was telling me something real. That this had happened enough times that he’d built a whole system around absorbing it. That the calculus of responding, of objecting, of asking for basic decency, had stopped being worth the math. That somewhere along the line he’d traded his right to be bothered by it for something more useful, like not spending energy on a fight he’d already lost a hundred times over.
I’ve seen that in patients too. The ones who apologize for taking up bed space. Who say “sorry to be a bother” when you’re literally there to help them. Who’ve been treated like inconveniences for so long that they’ve started to believe it.
It’s not peace. It’s not dignity. It’s just what’s left when you’ve run out of the other options.
So I said come on. Not because I had a plan. Not because I thought I could fix anything. Just because the alternative was sitting there and watching him pick up his grocery bag and shuffle off to make a lunch window that was nineteen minutes away.
Twelve Minutes in a Car
I drive a 2017 Civic with a cracked passenger-side mirror and a backseat full of reusable grocery bags I keep forgetting to bring into the store. Curtis got in without ceremony. Set his grocery bag on his lap. Buckled his seatbelt.
I asked him where he was from originally. He said Bangor. Came down to Portland in his late twenties for work, met his wife Sandra at a plant where they both worked, stayed ever since.
Sandra. He said her name once and then didn’t say it again.
He’d been a machinist for a company that made components for marine engines. Good work, he said. Steady. The kind of job where you knew what you were doing with your hands and you went home tired in the right way. The company restructured when he was 58. Offered early retirement packages to the older floor workers. He took it because Sandra was already sick and he thought they’d have time together.
They had fourteen months.
After she died, he said, the apartment was too much. The rent had gone up twice in three years. His savings were mostly gone from her treatments. He had a daughter somewhere, he said, but they’d lost touch. He’d moved around a lot. Shelters, mostly. Sometimes friends’ couches, but that well runs dry faster than you’d think.
He said all of this while watching the city go by outside the window. Like he was narrating someone else’s life.
I kept both hands on the wheel.
We pulled up to the Deering shelter at 12:53. Seven minutes to spare.
The Man at the Door
His name was Phil. Big guy, thick through the shoulders, wearing a Carhartt vest over a flannel shirt even though it was almost June. He’d clearly known Curtis for a while because he said his name the way you say the name of someone you’ve been worried about.
“Curtis. Didn’t see you yesterday.”
“Had a rough night,” Curtis said. “But I made it.”
Phil looked at me. I was still standing by the car, not sure if I should leave.
“You his ride?”
“I’m just a nurse,” I said, which made no sense as a sentence but Phil nodded like it did.
That’s when Curtis turned around and said it. This is the nurse who didn’t look away. He said it simply, no performance in it, just a statement of fact like the machinist work and the fourteen months and the couch that runs dry.
I didn’t know what to do with that so I did the dumb thing and reached into my bag and pulled out one of my cards. I’m not even sure why I carry them. I work in a hospital. Nobody needs my card. But I had them, and I gave him one, and he took it with both hands and looked at it.
The card has my name, my unit, the hospital’s main number. Standard issue. Nothing on it that should have meant anything.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he looked up.
Donna Fitch
“My daughter works at your hospital,” he said. “Her name is Donna Fitch. She’s been looking for me for two years.”
I stood there for a second with the car door half-open.
Donna Fitch.
I know Donna Fitch. Not well, not like friends, but I know her. She works in dietary. Short woman, late thirties, dark hair she keeps in a braid. We’d said good morning to each other maybe fifty times in the elevator. She’d brought a card around the unit last February for someone’s birthday and I’d signed it.
Two years.
I thought about Donna Fitch signing birthday cards and riding elevators and going home every night to whatever she went home to, and somewhere across the city her father was sleeping in a shelter and eating lunch through a window that closed at one.
I didn’t say any of this to Curtis. I just asked him, carefully, if he’d be okay to wait here while I made a call.
He said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
Phil held the door open. Curtis went inside.
I sat in my car in the shelter parking lot and scrolled to the hospital directory on my phone. My hands were doing something. I noticed that after, not during.
Donna Fitch, dietary services. Extension 4-something. I called the main number and asked them to connect me.
She picked up on the second ring.
I said, “Donna, this is going to sound strange. My name is Karen Marsh, I’m a nurse on the fourth floor. I think I just drove your father to lunch.”
Four seconds of silence.
Then: “Where is he? Is he okay? Where is he right now?”
What Happens After
I waited in the parking lot for forty minutes. Donna drove a green Subaru and she parked it half on the curb because she wasn’t thinking about parking.
She went inside. I didn’t follow her.
Phil came out about ten minutes later and leaned against the door frame. He didn’t say anything for a while. Then he said, “You want to know something? He talked about her all the time. Said he didn’t want her to see him like this.”
He looked at the door.
“That’s usually how it goes,” he said.
I sat with that.
I had to be at the hospital by four. I had time. I sat in the Civic with the cracked mirror and the reusable bags and I didn’t go anywhere for a while.
Donna came out about twenty minutes later. She’d been crying, the obvious kind, the kind you don’t bother trying to hide. She walked over to my car and I got out and she hugged me, which I wasn’t expecting, and she said thank you in a way that had too much in it for two words to hold.
I said I hadn’t done anything.
She pulled back and looked at me.
“You stopped,” she said.
I drove to the hospital. I was twelve minutes early for my shift. I changed into my scrubs in the locker room and I stood at the sink for a minute before I went out on the floor.
I thought about Gerald, the retired electrician, the one I walked past in the hallway twenty-some years ago.
I thought about how many Curtises there’d been between then and now. How many benches I’d sat on and not looked up from my phone.
The window above the sink looks out onto the parking structure. Concrete, nothing to see. I looked at it anyway.
Then I went to work.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it along. Someone you know might need the reminder that stopping is enough.
If you enjoy stories about standing up for yourself, you might want to check out “I Found a Forwarded Email on the Printer With My Name In It”, or perhaps “The Man Laughed at My Husband at Our Anniversary Dinner. I Didn’t Go to the Restroom.” And for another tale of unexpected confrontations, read “I Told a Customer to Leave My Restaurant. Then Marcus Said “You Need to Come Look at This.””.
