I (28M) take my daughters to Riverside Park every Saturday morning. Becca is five, Dani is three. It’s our routine since my wife Trish went back to full-time work – I get the girls, she gets a morning to herself, and we all meet for lunch. I’ve been doing this for eight months. I know every regular. I know the dog people, the joggers, the retired guy who feeds the pigeons.
I didn’t know her.
She started showing up about three weeks ago. Same bench every time, right next to the sandbox. Sleeping bag, a cart with some bags, a coat that wasn’t warm enough for October. I told myself it wasn’t my place to say anything. Other parents were looking at her. I could feel it.
Then last Saturday, Becca walked up to her and asked her name.
The woman – maybe late fifties, maybe younger but she looked rough – she smiled at Becca and said “Debbie.” And something in my gut moved. Something old.
I walked over and I said, gently, I thought, that this was a kids’ park and maybe she’d be more comfortable somewhere else. I said the community center on Fifth had services. I kept my voice low. I thought I was being decent about it.
She looked up at me.
She had these gray eyes.
I know those eyes.
My friends are completely split on this – half say I had every right to say something, half say I should’ve just let it go. But nobody knows the part I haven’t told anyone yet.
I went home and I dug through a box in the back of my closet that I haven’t opened since I was nineteen. There’s one photo in there.
I held it next to the picture I took of her on my phone, because I needed to be sure.
My hands were shaking before I even looked at the two images side by side.
The Box
The box is a shoebox. Nike. I’ve moved it to three different apartments and now a house and I’ve never thrown it out, never really gone through it. It has a rubber band around it that I put on there at nineteen and never took off.
Inside: a birthday card from my grandmother who died when I was twenty-two. A broken watch I keep meaning to fix. A folded piece of notebook paper with a phone number on it from a girl named Christine I met at a concert and never called. And the photo.
The photo is from a Fourth of July. I’m maybe eight years old. I’m holding a sparkler with both hands and I’m grinning so wide you can see the gap where I lost a tooth. There’s a woman standing next to me with her arm around my shoulders. She’s laughing at something off-camera. She’s got dark hair and these pale gray eyes and she looks young and healthy and genuinely happy.
That woman is my Aunt Debbie.
My dad’s younger sister. She’d have been, what, thirty-one, thirty-two in that photo. She was the cool one. She let me stay up late when she babysat. She knew every word to every song on the radio. She smelled like vanilla and cigarettes and she called me “kid” like it was an actual name.
She disappeared from our lives when I was around ten or eleven. My dad said she had “problems.” My mom said she’d “made choices.” Nobody ever explained it to me directly. She just stopped being at holidays. Stopped being mentioned. And then I got older and stopped thinking to ask.
I put the shoebox photo next to the photo on my phone.
Same eyes. Same shape to the nose. Same way her mouth goes even when she’s not smiling.
I sat on the closet floor for a while.
What I Actually Said to Her
Here’s the thing about how I said it that I keep coming back to.
I was gentle. I was calm. I crouched down to her level because I didn’t want to loom over her. I used the word “comfortable.” I mentioned the community center because I genuinely looked it up once, months ago, when I first started noticing more people sleeping rough near the park.
But I also took a photo of her on my phone.
Not to identify her. Not because I had any inkling. I took it because I was going to post in the neighborhood Facebook group. I was going to say something like has anyone else noticed this woman near the sandbox and let the group do what neighborhood Facebook groups do, which is complain until someone calls someone and the problem moves somewhere else.
I didn’t post it. I got home, Becca needed lunch, Dani had a meltdown about her shoes, and I forgot about it until I was doing dishes and my brain went back to those eyes.
The photo is still in my camera roll. I’ve looked at it maybe fifteen times in the last week.
She didn’t recognize me. I’m almost certain of that. I was eight the last time she saw me. I’m a grown man now with a beard and about forty extra pounds of adult life on me. When I crouched down and said my piece, she just looked at me. Didn’t argue. Didn’t say anything. Just watched me with those gray eyes until I stood back up and walked away.
She was gone from the bench by the time I loaded the girls into the car.
The Part Where I Try to Figure Out If I’m the Asshole
My friend Greg says I’m not. He’s got two kids of his own and he says any parent would’ve done the same thing, that I was polite about it, that the park has rules about overnight camping anyway.
My friend Sandra says I absolutely am, that I had no right to make her feel unwelcome in a public space, that I don’t know her situation.
They’re both right and they both don’t know the full thing yet.
Because here’s what I keep getting stuck on: even if that woman wasn’t my Aunt Debbie, even if she was a complete stranger, what exactly was I protecting my kids from? She was sleeping. She’d smiled at Becca. She’d given her name. She wasn’t loud, wasn’t erratic, wasn’t doing anything except existing on a bench in October in a coat that wasn’t warm enough.
I was protecting my kids from the sight of her. From having to explain something to a five-year-old that I didn’t want to explain.
And now I find out the woman I moved along like a problem to be solved is someone who held me at a Fourth of July party and let me stay up past midnight watching fireworks from her apartment balcony.
I don’t know what to do with that.
What I Know About Debbie
Not much. I tried calling my dad the day after I found the photo. We talked for twenty minutes and I didn’t bring it up. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t get there.
What I know is this: she was funny. She was the only adult in my family who ever talked to me like I had things worth saying. She played cards with me and didn’t let me win. She taught me to shuffle a deck properly, the bridge way, and I still do it that way now.
I know she had a boyfriend my parents didn’t like. I know there was some kind of falling out that my mom described once, years later, as “Debbie doing Debbie things,” which told me nothing. I know my dad has a sister he never mentions and I stopped asking about her somewhere around thirteen because it made him go quiet in a way that meant the subject was closed.
I know she’d be fifty-four now, maybe fifty-five.
The woman on that bench looked every one of those years and then some.
Saturday Is Coming
I’ve been back to the park twice this week. Tuesday morning, just me, before work. Thursday at dusk. She wasn’t there either time.
I don’t know if she found somewhere else because I asked her to, or because the weather got worse, or for some other reason entirely that has nothing to do with me. The bench just has pigeons on it now. The retired guy who feeds them nodded at me like usual.
I keep thinking about what I’d say if she came back.
I’ve written it in my head maybe a dozen different ways. Some of them start with her name. Some of them start with mine. Some of them start with I think I know you which is probably the most honest version but also the one that scares me most to say out loud. Because what if I’m wrong. And what if I’m right.
Trish knows something is going on with me. She hasn’t pushed. She’s like that, she gives me room to get there on my own, which I love about her and also sometimes drives me crazy because I want her to just ask so I have to say it.
I haven’t told her about the photo yet. I haven’t told anyone about the photo.
I’m going to go to the park Saturday. Same time as always, 9am, Becca will want to go on the swings first and Dani will make a beeline for the sandbox. I’m going to bring coffee in the thermos like I always do.
And I don’t know what I’m going to do if she’s there.
I don’t know what I’m going to do if she isn’t.
The Thing I Keep Not Saying
I asked her to leave.
She left.
And somewhere in this city right now there is a woman who used to hold me and call me “kid” and she is sleeping somewhere in October in a coat that isn’t warm enough, and the last person in her family to see her face to face told her, gently, that she’d be more comfortable somewhere else.
I keep thinking about Becca walking up to her. Five years old, zero hesitation, just hi what’s your name like it was the most natural thing in the world. And Debbie smiling. And me walking over to fix a problem.
I don’t think I’m the asshole for not recognizing her. I hadn’t seen her in twenty years and I was eight.
But I think I might be the asshole for the photo in my camera roll. The one I almost posted.
The one that would’ve made sure she didn’t come back.
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If this one is sitting with you, pass it along. Someone else probably needs to read it.
For more stories about life’s curveballs and difficult choices, check out My Husband’s Nine-Year-Old Said Something That Made Me Question Everything I’ve Done in This Marriage, My Recorder Was Running. He Saw It. And He Asked Me to Kill the Story Anyway., or My Father Showed Up in My Driveway After Eleven Years. I Didn’t Let Him In..
