I was helping Marcus wheel himself to his car after his appointment when the man in the SUV LEANED OUT HIS WINDOW and said, “Buddy, those spots are for people who actually need them.”
Marcus lost both legs in Fallujah. He’s been my patient for three years.
I’ve watched him relearn how to exist. I’ve watched him sit in the waiting room on bad days, not because he had an appointment, but because the VA was the only place he didn’t feel like he had to explain himself. I’m Denise. I’ve held his hand through more than I’m supposed to admit.
The man in the SUV wasn’t disabled. He was just in a hurry.
Marcus said nothing. He transferred into his car the way he always does – methodical, quiet, like he’s done it a thousand times because he has. I stood there with the empty wheelchair and I smiled at the man and said, “Have a good day.”
That was a mistake. Because the man took it as permission.
“You people need to learn how to manage your patients,” he said. “This lot is always full of these vehicles.”
I still didn’t say anything.
But I got his plate number.
I have a friend who works at the county clerk’s office. Her name is Brianna, and she owes me a favor from two years ago that I’ve never called in.
Until last week.
The man’s name is Gerald Pitt. He owns a landscaping company on Route 9. He has a Facebook page with 4,200 followers where he posts patriotic graphics every Veterans Day.
EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR.
I printed twelve of them.
Then I found the emails for every Veterans Service Organization within forty miles, the local paper, and three TV stations.
I also found his biggest commercial client – the city parks department.
I wrote one email. I attached the plate number, the date, the time, and a description of what he said to a double amputee outside the VA.
I sent it at 6 a.m. on a Tuesday.
By noon, my phone was going off.
By 3 p.m., Marcus called me.
“Denise,” he said. “Did you do something?”
I didn’t answer right away.
“Because Gerald Pitt just called me directly and he’s – ” Marcus stopped. “He’s asking me not to go to the news.”
What I Did Not Say Out Loud
I want to be honest about something.
When Marcus said Gerald Pitt’s name, I felt something I’m not going to dress up. It wasn’t satisfaction exactly. It was more like watching a door close on a room you’d been locked out of for a long time. Cold and final and not as good as you thought it would be.
I said, “What did you tell him?”
Marcus laughed. Not the polite kind. The other kind, the one that comes from somewhere lower. “I told him I’d think about it.”
I asked him how Gerald had gotten his number. Marcus didn’t know. Gerald didn’t say. My guess is someone who saw the email thread did some connecting of their own. The VSO network is not small, and some of those guys have been around long enough to know how to find people when they want to.
Marcus wasn’t upset. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. He wasn’t rattled by Gerald calling him. He was almost amused. He said Gerald sounded like a man who’d Googled himself and not liked what he found.
I could picture it. Gerald, sitting at a kitchen table somewhere off Route 9, phone in hand, working through the stages.
Gerald Pitt, In Stages
I know his type. I’m not proud of how well I know his type.
He would have started with denial. Not me. Somebody’s confused. Then anger, because Gerald seems like a man who goes to anger fast. Then the slow, bad realization that the plate number and the timestamp don’t care about his feelings.
Then he called Marcus.
What do you even say? What script do you reach for when you’ve screamed at a double amputee in a parking lot and then had to dial his number from memory because someone gave it to you? What do you lead with?
Marcus told me Gerald said he was “having a bad day.”
He said he didn’t realize. He said he has a lot of respect for veterans. He said he’s donated to the Wounded Warrior Project. He actually said that. The Wounded Warrior Project. Like that was a receipt he could produce.
Marcus listened to all of it. He said he didn’t interrupt once.
Then he said, “Okay, Gerald. I’ll be in touch.”
And he hung up.
What Marcus Told Me Next
He called me back twenty minutes later. I was still at the clinic, sitting in my car in that same parking lot, eating a granola bar I didn’t want.
“You know what the funniest part is?” he said.
I said I didn’t.
“He kept calling me ‘buddy.’ The whole call. Like we were old friends. Like that wasn’t the word he used when he was yelling at me.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Buddy,” Marcus said again, flat. “He said, ‘Buddy, I hope we can put this behind us.’ He said it twice.”
There’s a version of this story where Marcus is furious. Where he wants blood. I’ve seen Marcus furious – it’s quiet and specific and it has a very long memory. But that afternoon he just sounded tired. Not defeated. Just tired the way people get when something stupid costs them more energy than it should have.
He asked me what I wanted to do.
That surprised me. It was his parking lot, his chair, his legs. But he was asking me.
I said I didn’t know yet.
The Email Responses
I should back up and tell you what happened between 6 a.m. and noon, because it didn’t happen slowly.
The first response came in at 6:47 a.m. from a guy named Don who runs the county chapter of a veterans organization I won’t name because I didn’t ask his permission. Don’s message was four sentences long and the last one said, I know two people on the parks department board.
By 8 a.m. I had eleven replies.
By 9 a.m. the local paper had emailed back asking if I was willing to speak on the record. I said I needed to think about it. They said they understood and that they’d already made some calls of their own.
At 10:14 a.m., someone forwarded my email to Gerald’s Facebook page. Not his personal page. His business page. The one with the landscaping photos and the Veterans Day graphics.
I didn’t do that part. I want to be clear about that. I sent one email to a specific list. What other people did with it after that was their decision. I’m not going to pretend I’m sorry it happened. But I didn’t do it.
By 11 a.m. the comments on his business page were running about forty to one.
The parks department called the clinic looking for me at 11:52. The receptionist took a message. She didn’t know what it was about. She handed me the slip with a look that said she knew something was happening and she was waiting to find out if she should be worried.
I told her everything was fine.
It wasn’t not fine. It was just more than I’d planned for.
What the Parks Department Said
I called them back from my car. A woman named Carol picked up, and she was careful the way people get when they’re talking about something their legal department hasn’t cleared yet.
She said they were aware of the situation. She said they took their relationships with community members seriously. She said they had a contract with Pitt Landscaping that was up for renewal in March.
She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to.
I thanked her and hung up and sat there for a minute. The granola bar was still in my bag. I still didn’t want it.
The city parks contract is worth somewhere around $180,000 a year, based on what I found when I looked up public procurement records that same morning. I’m a nurse, not an accountant, but I can read a spreadsheet. That’s not a small number for a landscaping company on Route 9.
Gerald had yelled at a man in a parking lot for eleven seconds, maybe twelve. He’d called that man buddy. And now he was on the phone begging because $180,000 was making a noise it hadn’t made before.
I didn’t feel good about that. I want to say I did. I really wanted to feel good about that.
But Marcus had been in that parking lot too, and he was tired, and he’d had to spend part of his afternoon listening to a man explain himself. That cost something. That always costs something, and nobody was going to reimburse him for it.
What We Decided
Marcus came in two days later. Not for an appointment. He just showed up around 2 p.m. and sat in the waiting room for a while, and then the receptionist told me he was there, and I went out and we went to the break room and I made him bad coffee and he drank it anyway.
He said he’d been thinking.
He said he didn’t want to do the news interview. He said he’d done enough explaining of himself to enough people and he wasn’t going to do it for a TV camera so that Gerald Pitt could be the reason people knew his name.
I said that made sense.
He said he was going to write Gerald a letter. On paper. Mailed. He said he wanted Gerald to have something he’d have to hold in his hands.
I asked him what the letter was going to say.
He thought about it for a second. “Not much. I’m going to tell him I accepted his apology. And I’m going to tell him that the next time he sees a disabled parking placard, I want him to think about what it cost.”
That was it. No threat. No request. Just that.
He mailed it the next day, he told me later. He didn’t keep a copy.
I don’t know if Gerald Pitt kept his parks contract. I didn’t follow up with Carol. I could have. I decided not to.
I know Marcus still comes in on bad days sometimes. He still sits in the waiting room when he doesn’t have an appointment. Last week he brought in a coffee for the receptionist, which he’s never done before. She didn’t know what to do with it. She thanked him about four times.
He just said, “It’s coffee, Sandra.”
She laughed. He almost did.
That’s the part I keep thinking about. Not Gerald on the phone, not the parks contract, not the Facebook comments. Just Marcus saying it’s coffee, Sandra like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
He transferred into his car that afternoon the way he always does. Methodical. Quiet. The chair folded and went in the back and the door closed and he pulled out of the lot clean.
I stood there and watched him go.
—
If this one got to you, pass it on. Someone out there needs to read it.
For more stories about life’s unexpected twists and turns, check out My Best Friend Opened the Door and I Held Up My Phone, or read about how My Best Man Told Me My Sister Wasn’t Invited to My Own Wedding. You might also enjoy My Best Friend Replied “I’ve Been Missing You So Much” Right Before I Showed Her Everything for another tale of revealing truths.
