Week Three: "What, you're afraid of homeless people?" "No, I just didn't want to disturb him"

Sadie and Anna returned from the bookstore with a story to tell. Sadie – his daughter – had discovered a homeless man sleeping in one of the store’s few stuffed chairs.

                “He just looked homeless,” she said, as if her father was an unclever child and her patience for him was wearing thin.

                “But you don’t know that, Sade,” he said. “It’s none of our business. Be nice.”

                “Oh my god. How was I not being nice?” she appealed upward, to her god or the food court’s skylight ceiling. “It’s Anna who was afraid of him.”

                Anna – a nice girl; nicer, maybe, than his daughter – turned a mottled scarlet on her slender neck and quietly insisted that she had not been afraid of him.

                “Then why wouldn’t you sit next to him? I dared you to do it and you wouldn’t.”

                “I just didn’t want to disturb him, okay?”

                “Plus he smelled, right?”

                “I don’t know,” Anna said.

                “Sadie,” he began, but she had already taken Anna’s hand and rushed off toward a table of boys from their school.

                Once, his first week or two of college in the city, an older black woman staggered into his arms and begged to go to the hospital.

                “I’m going to die. I’m going to die,” she cried, over and over. Her hand was so smooth and warm in his. He held her up as they tried to hail a cab – something he’d never done before.

                “I know you’re not going to let me die. Thank you,” she whispered, patting his arm. She was slender, with short hair, and swayed dangerously as cab after cab passed him. Other students – some of them his classmates, maybe – swirled by on their way elsewhere. No one else stopped.

                Finally, a taxi did pull up to them, but the driver wouldn’t take her. What else was there to do? With conviction, he got in the back seat and told the driver that he would pay. At the emergency room entrance, they helped her into a wheelchair and brought her in. And then she was gone.

               He stood outside, processing everything. What it meant. What now for him? He was eighteen years old, and when a man who had been standing nearby, watching, commented that it was a nice thing he had done for that lady, but they were just going to wheel her back out the other side when they found out she couldn’t pay, something small changed inside him. Afterwards, he kept clear of strange people who asked him for things. He averted his eyes, mumbled an apology, and sometimes, as he did now, wondered what happened to that young idealist who tried to save a life.

                He knew for certain that he would tell Sadie not to get in a cab with a drug addict. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’re alone with someone who has nothing to lose, he’d say.

                But he also knew that he wouldn’t have to. Watching her now, laughing with those boys while Anna looked away, embarrassed, it was clear to him that his daughter would never do what he’d felt he had to that strange night.

                He was glad for that. He thought he should be, anyway.