Am I the asshole for pretending not to recognize my former coworker when I ran into her at a Goodwill – and then following her through the store for twenty minutes instead of just saying hello?
I (50F) spent eleven years working at the same regional bank branch as Donna Hartwell (51F, I think now). We weren’t close friends but we weren’t strangers either – we ate lunch together probably twice a week for most of a decade, I went to her daughter’s graduation party, I knew her coffee order and she knew mine.
That was six years ago, before the branch restructuring that cut half of us loose.
I lost my job in that same round of cuts. I landed on my feet – took a year, but I landed. I never thought much about what happened to the others.
I was at the Goodwill on Meridian on a Tuesday afternoon, going through the housewares section, when I saw her.
I knew it was Donna immediately. Same height, same way of standing with her weight on one hip. But she was in a Goodwill vest. Working there. Sorting a bin of donated clothes by the changing rooms.
My first instinct was to call her name. I didn’t.
I don’t know why I didn’t. I told myself I wasn’t sure. I told myself I didn’t want to embarrass her. I told myself she’d see me in a second anyway.
She didn’t see me. She kept working.
I spent the next twenty minutes in that store and I am not proud of this – I watched her. I watched her fold a man’s blazer someone had donated. I watched her help an older woman find a fitting room. I watched her laugh at something a kid said near the toy bins.
She looked fine. She looked NORMAL. She looked like a person who had found a life that fit her.
And I felt something I still can’t name right. It wasn’t pity. It was more like – panic. Like if it happened to Donna it could happen to me. Like I needed to understand the distance between her life and mine before I could figure out what to do with my face.
I got to the register with a lamp I didn’t need and a set of bowls.
The cashier called for backup and I heard Donna’s voice before I saw her walk up to the second register.
She looked right at me.
I looked right back.
And then I did the thing I cannot stop thinking about – I looked away first. Deliberately. Like I didn’t know her.
She started ringing up the woman ahead of me. I was next in line. Thirty seconds, maybe forty-five, and I would be standing right in front of her.
My heart was going so fast.
I put the lamp and the bowls down on the belt.
She looked up at me and said, “Did you find everything okay?” in that exact voice I remembered from a hundred Tuesday lunches, and I opened my mouth –
What Came Out
“Yes, thanks.”
That’s it. That’s what I said. Yes, thanks.
She typed something into the register. I stared at the card reader. The bowls were blue, I remember noticing that for the first time right then, like my brain needed something small to hold onto. Blue with a white rim. Four of them. I did not need four blue bowls.
She said my total was $11.47.
I tapped my card.
She handed me the bag and said, “Have a great day,” and I said, “You too,” and I walked out.
I sat in my car for probably six minutes without starting it.
Here’s the thing I keep circling back to. Donna didn’t react. She didn’t flinch, didn’t do a double-take, didn’t call my name across the register. She just did her job. Which means one of two things: she didn’t recognize me, or she recognized me and decided to let me have the lie.
I can’t figure out which one is worse.
The Year I Don’t Talk About
After the branch closed, I was unemployed for fourteen months.
I’ve told people “about a year” so many times that the extra two months have basically stopped existing in my memory. But it was fourteen months. I applied for 63 jobs. I know that because I kept a spreadsheet. I stopped keeping the spreadsheet when I got the offer from the credit union downtown, because I couldn’t stand looking at it anymore.
During those fourteen months I shopped at Goodwill.
Not the one on Meridian. The one on Fletcher, which is farther from my neighborhood, which I told myself was because it had better housewares. It didn’t have better housewares. It was just far enough that I was unlikely to run into anyone.
I bought a winter coat there. A KitchenAid mixer that still works. A lamp, actually, not unlike the one I grabbed on Tuesday for reasons I still don’t fully understand.
I was not embarrassed about shopping there. I want to be clear about that, or at least I want to believe I’m clear about it. But I drove the extra twelve minutes anyway.
So when I saw Donna in that vest, I knew exactly what I was feeling and I still couldn’t name it out loud. It wasn’t pity. It was recognition. The specific recognition of someone who has stood in a version of that spot and does not want to remember what it felt like.
What I Know About Donna
Her daughter’s name is Kayla. The graduation party was at her sister’s house, big yard, someone brought a Costco cake. Donna’s husband at the time was named Phil, though I think they split up somewhere around 2020 because she’d mentioned it once to a mutual acquaintance and I’d heard secondhand.
She took her coffee with oat milk before oat milk was everywhere. She had to special-request it from the cafe two blocks from the branch and they’d roll their eyes at her and she did not care even a little.
She was good at her job. Not in a flashy way. In the way that the difficult customers always seemed to calm down once they got to her window. I used to watch that sometimes and think there was a skill there I didn’t have and probably never would.
When they announced the restructuring, she cried in the break room. Just for a few minutes, and then she stopped and washed her face and went back to her window. I handed her a paper towel. That was the most intimate moment we ever had, probably, and we never mentioned it again.
I don’t know what happened to her in the six years between that paper towel and the Goodwill vest. I don’t know if she tried to find work in finance and couldn’t. I don’t know if she chose this, or landed here, or is on her way somewhere else and this is just a Tuesday in the middle. I don’t know anything. I spent twenty minutes watching her from across a store and I know nothing.
The Arithmetic I Keep Doing
I’m 50. The credit union job is fine. It’s not the same as the bank job was at its best, but it’s stable and I’m good at it and I have decent benefits.
But I’m 50. And the industry keeps restructuring. And I know what a spreadsheet with 63 rows in it feels like at 2am.
The panic I felt when I saw Donna wasn’t about her. That’s the part I’ve been trying to get comfortable with for three days now. It was about the math. The math that says the distance between where I am and where she is isn’t as large as I’d like it to be. That the thing I keep referring to as “landing on my feet” was also just luck, partly. Good timing. A hiring manager who happened to like my handshake.
I looked away from Donna because looking at her meant doing that math out loud.
Which is not her fault. Which is not something she deserves. Which I know.
The Part I Actually Did Wrong
Here’s where I’ll take the asshole verdict if it’s coming.
It’s not the twenty minutes of watching. That’s weird, but I was processing something, and I wasn’t hurting anyone, and she didn’t see me.
It’s the register.
She looked right at me and said my name in her voice and I said “yes, thanks” like she was a stranger. Like eleven years and twice-a-week lunches and her daughter’s graduation cake and a paper towel in a break room were just nothing. Like she was nobody.
She gave me a chance, right there. She said “did you find everything okay” instead of “oh my god, is that you?” She made it easy. She handed me a door that was already open and I walked through it sideways, face turned, pretending the door wasn’t there.
That’s the part I can’t justify. I’ve tried four or five different ways and none of them hold up.
The closest I get is this: I was scared of what my face would do. I was scared I’d look at her with something she’d be able to read. Something that looked like pity even if it wasn’t pity. Something that would make her feel the distance I was trying to measure, and I didn’t want to do that to her.
But that’s still about me. That’s me protecting myself from the discomfort of my own face.
She’s the one who had to stand there and ring up my unnecessary lamp.
What Happens Now
I’ve thought about going back.
Tuesday afternoons seem to be her shift, or at least that’s when she was there. I could go back next Tuesday. I could buy something small. I could get in her line on purpose this time and say her name first, before she has to decide whether to say mine.
I could say: “Donna, hi, it’s me, I’m sorry I was weird last week, I don’t know what happened to my brain.”
She might not remember. She might have served a hundred customers since Tuesday and I might just be a woman who bought bowls.
Or she let me have the lie, and she’ll let me have the apology too, because that’s the kind of person she is. The kind who hands difficult customers down gently. The kind who cried for three minutes and then washed her face.
I don’t know if I’ll go back.
I know I should.
I know the lamp is sitting on my kitchen counter and every time I turn it on I think about her voice saying “did you find everything okay” and the four blue bowls are in my cabinet and I haven’t used them yet and probably won’t.
I put them where I can see them, though.
I don’t know why. Some part of me thinks I should have to look at them for a while.
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If this one stayed with you, pass it along to someone who’d get it.
For more tales of unexpected encounters and family drama, you might want to check out how one person’s daughter messaged them after eight years, or read about someone who found their dad in the cereal aisle. You can also discover why one daughter stopped running to daycare.
