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Night on the Town, No. 3 (D.C.)

Bill Tope

    The attractive middleaged woman paused under the streetlamp and gazed across the street at the office building, where indigent elderly people custered along one wall of the edifice. She self-identified as a bleeding heart liberal and was determined to do good on this night, Christmas Eve. Gingerly, but with determination, she approached the disheveled queue. She spotted one particularly downtrodden looking individual.
    “Are you going in for the night?” asked Deidre, placing a hand on the old woman’s arm. The snow was plummeting from the gray clouds overhead, with a slush building up beneath their feet.
    “I...got nowhere to go,” explained the woman, feeling suddenly tired. Her voice was ancient, her hair nearly white, her skin careworn.
    “I’m Deidre, what’s your name?”
    “Sadie,” replied the woman.
    “I can take you somewhere warm,” offered Deidre, trying to keep the old woman’s attention. She seemed to be fading rapidly.
    “I can’t go to no shelter,” she protested. “They’s full of thieves, criminals, and...”
    “Somewhere else,” said Deidre.
    “Jail?” the old woman asked, alarmed, looking up into Deidre’s face. “I don’t wanna go to the county lockup,” she said, pushing away from the other woman. She had a stricken look on her face.
    “No,” said Deidre, “not jail. To my home.” She closed the distance between the two of them again.
    The aged woman’s features relaxed. “Alright, ‘hon, that’d be nice,” she said, seeming to surrender, and walked with the younger woman across the street to the waiting car. The inside of the vehicle was toasty warm and Sadie instantly relaxed. Deidre’s husband, Carl, was behind the wheel. He grinned up at them.
    “We okay?” he asked.
    “Yes,” replied Deidre. The other woman nodded. In short order the car knifed silently through the streets, over the wet pavement, and eventually drew up before a large, well-appointed home on a sizeable estate in Georgetown.
    McMansion, thought Deidre to herself. hating herself for her own opulence. Deidre and Carl took the old woman into their home and, through heated food and piping hot cocoa, managed to warm her up. Sitting on an ottoman before the fireplace, Sadie drank her third cup of chocolate.
    “Dear,” said Deidre. touching Sadie’s elbow, “you were dehydrated. You’ve got to remember to hydrate when you’re on the streets,” she scolded mildly.
    “Most people don’t offer you a bottle of water,” explained Sadie, drinking more cocoa. “They take a broom to you, tell you get out from in front of their store, call the cops on you, pour water on you...”
    “No!” said Carl, outraged.
    Sadie smiled weakly. “Afraid so.” Carl shook his head.
    “Well,” he said, “you can stay here tonight.”
    She smiled. “Thank you, son.” Carl’s brow furrowed. His own parents had died when he was just an infant; no one had called him “son” in forty years.
    When the couple excused themselves to the kitchen to do the dishes, Deidre said, “What about after?”
    “After what?”
    “After tonight. What will become of her then?”
    Carl’s eyes grew wide, he shrugged. “I don’t know. We can’t keep her.” At her blank stare, he said, “Why, what were you thinking? You want her to live here, like permanently?” he asked, surprised.
    “No, not permanently, but until she can get back on her feet. She’s old, Carl. And she’s not well.”
    “How long do you think that’ll be? I mean, what’s her story? Can she work, can she support herself? Although there is something vaguely familiar about her, we don’t really know her.”
    “Surely she must qualify for social security,” Deidre pointed out. “She’s got to be at least eighty. If nothing else, then SSI. And Medicare.”
    He nodded. “Let’s talk to her.” They headed back out to the living room.
    “Sadie,” Carl began, “we were thinking that maybe you could stay here, with us, until you’re ready to jump back into society. You’re down on your luck now, but you’ll bounce back, you’ll see.” The woman stared sadly back at them.
    “There’s elderly housing on Forest Street,” added Deidre. “They take, like a third of your government benefits. You’d have a roof over your head, and the rest of your money for expenses.”
    Sadie looked puzzled. “But, I don’t get a check from the government no more,” she told them.
    “Well,” said Carl, “you would perhaps qualify for social security; have you ever applied?” She shook her head no. “At the very least, Medicaid; then you could maybe get into a nursing home, where everything would be paid for. You’d have your room and board and your medicine and a doctor and a nurse on staff and companionship. C’mon, doesn’t that sound better than sitting on the sidewalk in Washington, D.C. at midnight on Christmas Eve?” They smiled encouragingly at her.
    “I think there’s something maybe you two better see,” she said, digging into her threadbare cloth handbag.
    “What is it?” asked Deidre, afraid for an instant that the old dear would turn up a handgun or some other weapon. Had they badly misjudged her?
    “My I.D.,” replied Sandie, extracting a laminated card from a billfold and handing it over.
    Carl accepted it. “We already know who you are,” he protested. “You don’t have to...” He glanced at the now familiar face in the picture. A frisson of recognition tweaked his brain.
    “Read it,” she told him. He did so, then looked up at her.
    “This can’t be right,” he said.
    “It’s perfectly right,” said Sadie.
    “What is it?” asked Deidre, craning her neck to look.
    He handed her the card. “Check date of birth,” he said.
    “Sadie,” began Carl, “how long have you been living on the streets?”
    She looked embarrassed. “A little more than a year,” she murmured.
    “What did you do before...you ended up there?” Deidre coaxed from her.
    “I was actually a lawyer,” she said. They exchanged a doubtful glance. “It’s true,” she said. “I was a criminal defense attorney.”
    “Where did you work?” asked Carl gently. She named one of the foremost legal firms in D.C. Carl blinked in surprise. It would be the matter of a single phone call to substantiate this claim. Carl was well connected in the nation’s capital. He could find out in an instant. Why would she tell such a disputable lie. “Then why aren’t you...practicing law...now? Did you retire?”
    “Got fired. Nobody will hire me now. My reputation is destroyed,” she added bleakly. Carl and Deidre exchanged another glance.
    Deidre looked down at the card and read aloud. “August 17th, 19—” She ogled the old woman. “It says here you’re just 41 years old. How is that possible?” she asked. She did quick mental math and determined that Sadie was three years younger than was she herself. “Sadie,” asked Deidre, “what happened to you?”
    “I spent three years,” said Sadie, “as legal counsel to the 45th president of the United States.”

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