Am I the asshole for pretending not to recognize someone I used to work with – and then following her to find out what happened to her?
I (50F) used to work in corporate law at a mid-size firm in the city, Hargrove & Belk, back in the early 2000s.
Sandra Okonkwo (we were both around 30 at the time) was one of the sharpest associates I’d ever seen.
She made partner before I did.
Then around 2008 she just… wasn’t there anymore.
I assumed she’d moved to another firm. I was dealing with my own stuff – divorce, the recession hitting our client base – and I didn’t ask questions.
That was my first failure.
Last Tuesday I was at the Dellwood Public Library on my lunch break, returning some books my daughter left at my place.
There was a woman at the corner table near the periodicals, wrapped in a green army surplus jacket even though it was sixty-two degrees outside.
She had a rolling cart – the kind with the bungee cords holding black trash bags on it.
I almost kept walking.
Then she turned her head.
I KNEW HER.
My legs stopped before my brain did.
It was Sandra.
Her hair was different – shorter, grayed out – and she was thinner than I remembered, but it was HER.
The way she held her jaw, the way she read with her finger tracing the line.
I stood there in the stacks for probably four full minutes, watching her like a coward.
Part of me said walk over, say her name, do SOMETHING.
But I didn’t.
I checked out my books and left.
And then I sat in my car in the library parking lot for twenty minutes telling myself I was giving her privacy, that she might not want to be recognized, that it would embarrass her.
But here’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
I went BACK.
The next day.
I told myself I just wanted to make sure she was okay, that I wasn’t going to approach her, just check.
She was at the same table.
I sat two rows over with a book I wasn’t reading and I WATCHED HER for almost an hour.
She organized her bags twice.
She ate something from a ziplock bag – crackers, I think.
She charged a phone at the outlet near the window.
A librarian, young guy named Marcus according to his badge, brought her a cup of water without her asking.
Like it was a routine.
I didn’t say anything that day either.
My friends are split on whether what I did was creepy or just scared.
My daughter said, “Mom, you were basically surveilling a homeless woman because you felt guilty,” and I didn’t have an answer for that.
Because the thing is – I know WHY I didn’t speak to Sandra either time.
It wasn’t about protecting HER feelings.
I’ve been sitting with that for three days now.
And then this morning I went back to the library a third time, and Sandra was at her table, and she looked up from her book.
Directly at me.
And her face –
What Her Face Did
She knew.
Not in a slow-dawning, wait-is-that way. Immediately. The way you recognize someone who used to sit three offices down from you for six years, who borrowed your parking spot when you were at depositions, who left a card on your desk the morning your divorce was finalized with just her initials and a twenty-dollar coffee gift card inside.
She knew, and I watched her decide what to do about it.
Her chin lifted maybe half an inch. Her jaw set. And then she looked back down at her book.
Not embarrassed. Not wounded. Deliberate.
She was giving me the out I’d been too scared to take myself.
I walked over anyway.
I don’t know what happened in my body exactly, but my feet moved and then I was standing at the edge of her table and she was still looking at her page, and I said, “Sandra.” Just her name. That’s all I had.
She looked up.
“Carol,” she said.
And that was the whole greeting. Sixteen years, and we each got one word.
I asked if I could sit. She gestured at the chair across from her without saying anything. I sat down and put my bag in my lap and I had no idea what came next.
What I Didn’t Say
I didn’t say oh my god, what happened to you.
I didn’t say I’ve been so worried because I hadn’t been, not really, not until four days ago in a library parking lot.
I didn’t perform anything. I don’t know if that was wisdom or just that I was too off-balance to construct a sentence.
What I said was: “I saw you Tuesday and I didn’t come over and I’ve been trying to figure out why.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Picked up her cup of water, the one Marcus had brought, and held it with both hands.
“I know,” she said. “I saw you in the stacks.”
She’d seen me. Standing there for four minutes like an idiot, watching her trace lines in a book.
She hadn’t said anything either.
I asked her why.
She said, “Same reason you didn’t.”
What Sixteen Years Looks Like
We talked for almost two hours. I missed a one o’clock call I’d completely forgotten to cancel. I didn’t care.
Sandra left Hargrove & Belk in 2008 because she had a breakdown. That’s the word she used, plain and flat, not dressed up. A breakdown. She’d been working eighty-hour weeks for three years straight, had made partner, had started to realize that making partner meant the work didn’t get lighter, it got heavier, and somewhere in the spring of 2008 she stopped being able to get out of bed.
She told me her mother had died in January of that year. I didn’t know that. I hadn’t known.
She took leave. The firm, to their credit she said, held her position for six months. But when she came back she wasn’t the same and she knew it and they knew it and eventually there was a mutual parting and a severance package that lasted about two years.
Then a series of things that she listed in the same flat tone. A sublease that fell through. A lawsuit she’d gotten into with a former client that drained what was left. A friend’s couch. A shelter that didn’t feel safe. And then, about eight months ago, this library.
She said Marcus started bringing her the water about two weeks in. Never asked her anything. Never made it a thing. Just started doing it.
I sat there and I thought about how that young guy in a library badge had done more, consistently, than anyone in Sandra’s former professional life. Including me.
Especially me.
What I Actually Did Wrong
My daughter was right, but she was only half right.
Yes, I surveilled a homeless woman because I felt guilty. That’s true and it’s ugly and I’m not going to sand the edges off it.
But the bigger thing, the thing I’d been sitting with, is this: I didn’t ask what happened to Sandra in 2008 because asking would have required me to be paying attention to someone other than myself. And I was good at not doing that. I’d been good at it for years. The divorce gave me cover. The recession gave me cover. Being busy, being overwhelmed, being my own problem, all of it was cover.
Sandra made partner before me and then disappeared and I told myself she’d landed somewhere better. Because that was the story that required nothing from me.
Sixteen years later I’m sitting across from her in a library and she’s eating crackers from a ziplock bag and I’m finally, finally paying attention. Better late than never is a thing people say when they want to feel okay about being late.
I don’t feel okay about it.
What She Said When I Asked
I asked Sandra, toward the end, what she needed. Not what I could do, not what would help, just what she needed.
She was quiet for a bit. Reorganized the edge of her book so it was perfectly parallel to the table.
She said she needed stable housing. She was on two waiting lists. She had an intake appointment with a caseworker at the end of the month and she was cautiously optimistic about one of the programs, a transitional place over on Mercer Street that let residents stay for up to eighteen months while they rebuilt.
She said she did not need a job lead from me, and she said it without cruelty, just clearly. She said she wasn’t ready for that conversation and probably wouldn’t be for a while.
She said what she actually wanted, right now, was to finish the book she was reading, which was a biography of Shirley Chisholm she’d already read twice before.
I laughed. She almost smiled.
Before I left I wrote my cell number on the back of a library receipt I found in my bag. I slid it across the table. I said she didn’t have to use it and I wasn’t going to come back unless she told me to.
She picked it up. Looked at it. Put it in the front pocket of the green jacket.
“Okay, Carol,” she said.
And she went back to her book.
Where I’m At Now
I drove back to my office and sat in the parking garage for a while. Not crying, not having a moment, just sitting.
I’m not the hero of this. I want to be clear about that. I watched a woman I respected for six years living in a library and I needed three days and direct eye contact to do the bare minimum. Sandra has been carrying everything I didn’t notice for sixteen years and she’s still reading Shirley Chisholm for the third time and holding her jaw exactly the way she always did.
The asshole question. My daughter asked it first, really, even without the exact words.
Yeah. Partly. The watching was cowardly and I knew it was cowardly while I was doing it and I did it anyway. The not-asking in 2008 was worse because there was nothing stopping me except my own narrowness.
But I don’t think that’s the whole answer and I don’t think beating myself up about it is the point.
The point, I think, is the library receipt in her jacket pocket.
Whether she calls or not.
I hope she calls.
—
If this one got under your skin, pass it along to someone who might need to read it.
For more tales of unexpected encounters and hidden truths, you might appreciate the story about a note left by a homeless woman or perhaps the moment someone realized their dad was living a double life. You can also read about how a hidden voicemail revealed a family secret.
