Am I the asshole for walking away from someone who clearly needed help – just because of who she used to be?
I (50M) recognized her the second I sat down on that bench in Riverside Park, even though it took her a minute to place me too. I’ve got a mortgage, a job I’ve held for nineteen years, and a marriage that has survived three kids and a layoff. I tell you that because it matters – because the gap between where I’m sitting and where she was sitting is apparently not as wide as I’ve spent twenty years believing.
Her name is Donna. We worked together at Meridian Consulting back in 2006, 2007. She was my supervisor. Forty-two years old, two direct reports, the kind of person who could walk into a room and immediately make you feel like you were either her favorite person or completely invisible. I was usually invisible. There was a performance review she gave me in November of 2006 that I still think about sometimes. She told HR I had a “collaboration problem.” I almost lost my job.
I almost stood up and left when I first recognized her. I’m not proud of that. I sat back down because – I don’t know. Something made me.
She recognized me maybe five minutes later. “Craig,” she said. Not a question.
She didn’t apologize for the review. She didn’t mention it. She just started talking, and I let her, because what else do you do. She told me she’d been on and off the street for three years. That she’d had a daughter and then didn’t. That she’d had a condo in Hoboken and then didn’t.
I had twenty dollars in my wallet. I had my phone. I had a warm jacket. She had a paper cup with maybe sixty cents in it and a sleeping bag with a broken zipper.
I sat with her for maybe forty minutes. And then I said I had somewhere to be – which was true, I had to pick up my son from lacrosse – and I gave her the twenty and I left.
My wife says I did more than most people would have. My friend Dennis says I should’ve called 311 or a shelter, done something more. My friends are split on whether I’m an asshole or just a person who froze.
But that’s not actually what I keep thinking about.
What I keep thinking about is the last thing she said before I stood up. I almost didn’t hear it. She said it quietly, kind of to herself, and I pretended I didn’t catch it.
But I did catch it.
And it’s been three days and I can’t stop hearing it, because I think she was right.
What Forty Minutes on a Bench Actually Looks Like
I want to be honest about those forty minutes, because I’ve been rounding them up in my head ever since and that’s not fair to what actually happened.
The first ten minutes were just me sitting there trying not to look like I was cataloguing the differences between us. She had a cart nearby, one of those fold-up wire grocery carts, and it had a black garbage bag bungee-corded to it and a rolled-up tarp and what looked like a library book. I noticed the library book. I don’t know why that detail hit me the way it did. It was a paperback. I couldn’t see the title.
She wasn’t in bad shape physically. That was the first thing I’d thought when I recognized her, that she looked harder than I remembered but not broken. Her hair was cut short. She had on a North Face fleece, dark green, and I wondered for a second where that had come from, then hated myself for wondering.
She talked. I mostly listened.
She’d left Meridian in 2009, she said. Not fired. She’d left to take care of her mother, who had a stroke, and then her mother died and she went back to work but it was a different job, lower pay, and then there was a guy and she said that part fast, the way you summarize a chapter you don’t want to read again. The daughter she mentioned – her name was Becca, she said, and she said the name the way you say the name of something you lost a long time ago and still aren’t used to losing. Becca was with her father now, somewhere in Pennsylvania. Donna hadn’t seen her in fourteen months.
She didn’t cry. I want to make sure I say that. She wasn’t performing anything for me.
I gave her the twenty when I stood up. She looked at it for a second before she took it, and I don’t know how to describe that look except to say it wasn’t grateful and it wasn’t ungrateful. It was just tired.
The Thing She Said
I was already half-turned, already doing the thing where your body commits to leaving before you’ve finished the goodbye, and she said it.
“You were always a decent person. I don’t think I was.”
That was it. Said to the middle distance, not really to me. Like she was finishing a thought she’d been having before I ever sat down.
I said something. I don’t remember what. Something useless. And I left.
I picked up my son from lacrosse. He was annoyed because I was four minutes late and his shin guard was rubbing wrong and he wanted Chipotle. We got Chipotle. I sat across from him at a table by the window and watched him eat a burrito and I thought about Donna saying I don’t think I was and I couldn’t figure out what to do with it.
Because here’s the thing. She wasn’t decent. Not to me. The collaboration problem comment was bad enough but there was other stuff too. Small stuff that accumulates. The way she’d hand back your work in team meetings, loud enough for everyone to hear what was wrong with it. The time she told a client I was “still getting up to speed” on a project I’d been running for eight months. I was thirty-one. That job was the first one I’d had that felt like a real job and she made me feel like I was always one bad week from losing it.
I spent probably a year being angry at her. Then I changed jobs and the anger went somewhere quieter. Not gone. Just filed.
And then there she was on a bench in Riverside Park with sixty cents and a broken zipper on her sleeping bag, telling me she wasn’t a decent person. Past tense. Like she’d already ruled on it.
What I Actually Did and Didn’t Do
Dennis is right that I could’ve called 311. I know that now. I knew it then, honestly. I had my phone in my jacket pocket the whole time we were sitting there and I didn’t take it out once.
Part of that was practical. 311 in New York for a person who isn’t in immediate danger, who isn’t causing a problem, who is just existing on a bench – I’ve heard enough from people who work in social services to know what that call usually produces. Not much. Not fast. Maybe nothing.
But that’s not the only reason I didn’t call.
The other reason is that calling 311 would’ve meant doing something, and doing something would’ve meant committing to this situation in a way I hadn’t decided I wanted to commit to. It would’ve meant staying longer. Explaining to Donna what I was doing. Maybe she’d have wanted that, maybe not. It would’ve made the thing real in a different way than it already was.
I gave her twenty dollars because twenty dollars is a thing you hand to someone and then you’re done. It’s clean. It ends.
I know that. I knew it at the time. I’m not going to dress it up.
My wife, Karen, is a genuinely good person and she meant it when she said I did more than most. She’s probably right that most people who recognized someone from a bad chapter of their professional life would’ve stood up and walked away before the recognition fully registered. I didn’t do that. I sat down. I stayed forty minutes. I gave her what I had in my wallet.
But I also pretended not to hear what she said. And I’ve been thinking about why.
Why I Pretended
Because if I’d heard it – really heard it, out loud, between us – I would’ve had to respond to it.
And I don’t know what I would’ve said.
“It’s okay” isn’t true. It’s not okay that I spent a year anxious about losing my job because of how she ran those reviews. It’s not okay that she made me feel like I was incompetent in front of people I needed to work with. It’s not okay that I still, at fifty, carry that particular flavor of professional self-doubt that I’m pretty sure she installed.
But “it’s not okay” also feels like something you say to a person who has more to lose by hearing it. And she had nothing left to lose. Which somehow made it feel worse to say.
So I said something useless and I left.
Here’s the part I haven’t told Dennis or Karen yet. I went back to that park the next morning. Saturday. I told Karen I was going for a run, which I sometimes do, and I ran to Riverside Park and I went to that bench.
She wasn’t there. The bench was empty. There was a pigeon on it.
I stood there for probably two minutes feeling like an idiot, and then I ran home.
What I’m Actually Asking
I don’t think I’m an asshole for leaving. I think I’m an asshole for a more specific thing.
I think I’m an asshole for the forty minutes I spent sitting next to her while part of my brain was running a quiet little calculation about whether she deserved what was happening to her. I didn’t land on yes. I want to be clear about that. But I ran the calculation. I noticed I was running it. I kept running it anyway.
She’d been a bad supervisor. She’d been, by any reasonable measure, unkind to me in ways that had real professional consequences. And she was sitting on a bench in November with sixty cents and a busted sleeping bag and a daughter she hadn’t seen in over a year.
Those two things can both be true. I know they can both be true. I knew it sitting on that bench.
But knowing it and not running the calculation are two different things.
She said she didn’t think she was a decent person. And I pretended not to hear it. And I think the reason I pretended is that I wasn’t ready to tell her whether I agreed, and I wasn’t ready to tell her it didn’t matter, and I wasn’t ready to sit with her in the space where neither of those answers is right.
I just wasn’t ready.
It’s been three days. I keep thinking about the library book in the wire cart. I still don’t know what it was. I keep thinking about the way she said Becca’s name. I keep thinking about her saying I don’t think I was, to the middle distance, like a verdict she’d reached alone.
I don’t know if I’m an asshole. I think I’m just a person who sat on a bench for forty minutes and then left, and who has been sitting with it ever since.
The bench is probably empty again right now.
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If this one’s sitting with you too, pass it on.
For more tales of unexpected encounters and lingering questions, check out My Seven-Year-Old Said What I’d Been Too Scared to Say for Years, My Old Boss Walked Into My Shelter. I Pretended Not to Know Her – Then I Couldn’t Stop Myself., and She Rolled Down the Window and I Saw a Face I’d Been Running From for Five Years.
