I (32F) have been volunteering at Meridian House for almost four years, every Saturday without fail. I do intake, I do overnight checks, I do the things the paid staff don’t have time for. My supervisor, Donna (54F), has told me more than once that I treat this place like it’s mine. She didn’t mean it as a compliment.
Three weeks ago I was eating lunch on the bench outside Greenway Park, the one near the east entrance where the regulars tend to sit. A woman sat down next to me. She was maybe fifty, carrying a canvas tote with a broken strap, shoes that didn’t fit right. We talked. Her name was Patricia. She was easy to talk to in this way that felt familiar, like running into a neighbor.
By the end of the week I had her in the intake system at Meridian House. Bed 7. She was quiet, kept to herself, said thank you every time I handed her anything.
Then one of the other volunteers, Heather (28F), came to me on Thursday with her phone out.
She had pulled up a news article. 2019. A class action lawsuit against a property management company that had illegally evicted over two hundred low-income tenants – mostly families, mostly elderly – by falsifying maintenance records and cutting utilities. The company lost. The owner was ordered to pay restitution she never paid. She declared bankruptcy instead.
The owner’s name was Patricia Connell.
I stood there in the hallway for a long time.
Those two hundred families. Some of them probably ended up in places like Meridian House. Maybe some of them sat in Bed 7.
I didn’t say anything to Donna that night. But on Friday I went back to that park bench and Patricia was already there, saving me a spot like we’d made plans, and she started talking about how much she was looking forward to having somewhere stable, and I just sat there and let her talk, and something was happening in my chest that I didn’t have a name for.
My friends are split. Half of them say the shelter exists for exactly this situation and it’s not my place to make moral judgments about who deserves help. The other half say I already know what I’m going to do and I’m just looking for permission.
Saturday morning I walked into Donna’s office. I sat down across from her. I put Heather’s phone on the desk with the article pulled up.
Donna read it. She looked at me. And then she said – ## What Donna Said
“So?”
That was it. One word. She slid the phone back across the desk toward me and picked up her coffee.
I told her I thought she should know. She said she did know, actually. Heather had texted her Thursday night. I felt the back of my neck go cold. I’d spent two days thinking I was sitting on something, and Donna had already processed it and filed it away somewhere I couldn’t see.
I asked what she was going to do about it.
She looked at me for a second like she was deciding whether to answer. “Nothing,” she said. “Patricia Connell is a fifty-three year old woman with no fixed address and a broken-strap tote bag. That’s who I’m looking at.”
I said that wasn’t the whole picture.
Donna put her mug down. “You know what I’ve learned in twenty-two years of this work? The whole picture doesn’t fit in a shelter bed. We take who shows up.”
I sat with that. I didn’t like it. But I also didn’t have a clean counter-argument, so I just said I wasn’t sure I could keep doing her intake. Keep handing her things. Keep saying goodnight to her at lights-out like everything was ordinary.
Donna looked at me for a long time. Not unkind. Just steady in that way she has, where you feel like she’s already seen the version of you that exists six months from now.
“That’s your call,” she said. “But I need you to be honest about what you’re actually asking for.”
What I Was Actually Asking For
I drove home and sat in my car in the parking garage for maybe twenty minutes.
I kept thinking about a woman named Rosario who came through Meridian House about two years ago. She had three kids and a rolling suitcase and she’d been evicted in January. She told me once, while I was doing her intake paperwork, that the management company had turned off the heat in November and told her it was a boiler issue. Said they were working on it. She stayed because she had nowhere to go and the deposit on another place would’ve wiped her out. By January they’d filed the paperwork to remove her.
I’d thought about Rosario a lot over the past two days.
I don’t know if she was one of the two hundred. The lawsuit was in Chicago. Rosario was from here. The math didn’t line up. But my brain kept putting them in the same room anyway, Rosario with her rolling suitcase and Patricia with her broken tote, and it couldn’t figure out what to do with both of them at once.
Here’s the thing I kept circling back to. I hadn’t actually done anything yet. Patricia was still in Bed 7. Donna wasn’t removing her. The decision in front of me wasn’t really about Patricia at all. It was about me. About whether I could walk back into that building on Saturday and hand this woman a towel and a dinner tray and say “sleep well” at nine o’clock.
Whether I could do that without it meaning something I didn’t want it to mean.
That’s what Donna had seen that I hadn’t. I wasn’t asking what to do about Patricia. I was asking for someone to tell me my discomfort was justified. That I’d earned the right to act on it.
The Part I Didn’t Tell Donna
Wednesday night, before Heather came to me with the phone, Patricia had helped another resident.
Her name was Gwen. Sixty, bad knees, came in two weeks ago after her son stopped returning her calls. She’d been having trouble with the online form for emergency rental assistance, the one the city rolled out last year that requires a document upload and a phone that can actually run the browser without crashing. Patricia sat with her for an hour and a half at the common room table. Walked her through every step. Gwen got her confirmation email at 10:47 PM and cried a little, and Patricia patted her hand and said “you did it” like Gwen had done it herself.
I saw the whole thing from the hallway.
I’ve thought about it approximately nine thousand times since Thursday.
I don’t know what to do with a person who can do that. Who has apparently been through enough now that she knows how to sit with someone in that specific kind of scared, and be useful, and not make it about herself.
I don’t know if that cancels anything. I don’t think it does. But it’s there, in the ledger, and I can’t pretend it isn’t.
Saturday
I went back.
I almost didn’t. I sat in my car outside for eleven minutes. I know it was eleven because I watched the clock on my dashboard like it was going to tell me something useful.
Then I got out.
Patricia was in the common room when I came in. She looked up and nodded at me the way she always does, this small, no-fuss acknowledgment, and went back to her book. She had a library copy of something with a blue spine. I didn’t catch the title.
I did her check-in that evening. I handed her a clean set of towels. She said thank you. I said you’re welcome. The whole transaction took maybe forty-five seconds and nothing in my face gave me away, or if it did she didn’t react to it.
Later I was in the back doing inventory and Heather came in and asked me what I’d decided. I told her I was still there, wasn’t I.
She said that wasn’t an answer.
I told her I didn’t have a better one.
What I Keep Coming Back To
I’ve been volunteering here long enough to know that Meridian House has housed people who’ve done bad things. I don’t mean Patricia-level things, necessarily. I mean the full range of human behavior that ends a person up needing a shelter bed. People who’ve hurt their families. People who’ve stolen. People who made choices that put other people in hard places.
We don’t run background checks. That’s a policy decision and a funding decision and also, I think, a philosophical one. Donna has said more than once that if you only help people who haven’t done damage, you will have a very empty building.
I know all of this. I knew it before Saturday.
But knowing something and having it apply to a specific person sitting in a specific bed are two different operations, and my brain has been grinding on the gap between them for three weeks.
Here’s where I’ve landed, more or less. I’m not going to try to get Patricia removed. That’s not my call, and honestly I don’t think I could make it if it were. What she did was real and the harm was real and she got less than she deserved from the courts, but I’m not the courts and Meridian House isn’t a sentencing mechanism.
What I can control is smaller than that. I can keep showing up. I can keep doing the work. I can be civil to Patricia without being warm, and maybe that distance is the only honest thing I have to offer her right now.
I don’t know if that makes me the asshole. I don’t know if it makes me a good person either. It mostly just makes me the woman who shows up on Saturdays and does the intake and hands out the towels and tries to figure out, week by week, what she actually believes.
Donna caught me on my way out that night. She didn’t say anything about Patricia. She just said “good work today” and went back to her office.
I stood in the parking lot for a minute before I got in my car.
The light was doing that thing it does in October, going flat and orange around five o’clock, and somewhere in the building behind me Gwen was probably asleep already, and Patricia was probably reading her library book, and Bed 7 was just a bed.
I drove home.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it on to someone who’d have something to say about it.
For more thought-provoking stories about difficult choices, read about calling social services on a homeless woman or the time a granddaughter’s words kept her grandma awake. You might also appreciate this tale of a stranger who wasn’t a stranger at all.
