Am I the a**hole for following a stranger around a laundromat for twenty minutes because he looked like my dead husband?
I (38F) lost my husband Dale two years ago. Pancreatic cancer, six weeks from diagnosis to funeral, no time to prepare, no time for anything. We had a house, a dog, a joint checking account, twelve years of inside jokes – and then I had none of that. The dog died eight months after Dale did. I think she just missed him too much to stay.
I still go to the same laundromat on Tuesdays because Dale and I used to go together and I haven’t been able to explain to myself why I keep doing it.
Last Tuesday I was loading a dryer when a man walked in.
My hands stopped moving.
He had Dale’s exact build – that specific combination of broad shoulders and a slightly too-short torso that Dale used to complain about when buying dress shirts. He had the same way of walking, a little heavy on the left foot. Dark hair going gray at the temples in the same pattern. He was even carrying a blue laundry bag, and Dale always used a blue laundry bag, and I know that doesn’t mean anything but my brain didn’t care.
I didn’t approach him. I just… couldn’t stop being near him.
Every time he moved to a different machine, I found a reason to be close. Checking a dryer that wasn’t mine. Folding something I’d already folded. I wasn’t touching him, I wasn’t TALKING to him, I was just – I needed to be near that silhouette for a few more minutes. I know how that sounds.
After about twenty minutes he turned around and caught me staring.
He wasn’t unkind about it at first. He said, “Do I know you?”
I said no, I was sorry, he just looked like someone I used to know.
He nodded and went back to his machine. I should have left it there.
But then I said – and I genuinely don’t know why I said this – “Can I ask your name?”
He told me. It wasn’t Dale. Obviously it wasn’t Dale.
Then I said, “Could you just – this is going to sound crazy – could you just stand there for one more second?”
His whole face changed. He took a step back and said, “Lady, you need to stop.”
I left. I cried in my car for forty minutes. My friend Gina says I didn’t do anything wrong, that grief makes people act outside themselves. My friend Tasha says I ABSOLUTELY violated that man’s boundaries and I need to talk to someone.
I know Tasha’s probably right. I’ve known that since I drove home.
But two days later I got a message in my laundromat’s neighborhood Facebook group.
The Message
The group is mostly people complaining about someone leaving fabric softener sheets on top of the machines and the occasional lost sock post. I’m in it because Dale joined it and I never left. I check it maybe once a week without thinking much about it.
The notification came up Thursday morning while I was eating cereal standing over the sink, which is how I eat breakfast now because there’s no reason to sit at the table.
It was a post. Public, to the whole group. About two hundred members, mostly people from the four-block radius around the Suds & Save on Clement Street.
“To the woman at the laundromat Tuesday evening – I don’t know if you’re in this group, but I wanted to say something. I was the man you spoke to. I’m sorry I was short with you. I could tell something was wrong and I handled it badly. I hope you’re okay.”
I read it three times.
Then I put my cereal bowl in the sink and sat down on the kitchen floor, which is something I’ve been doing since Dale died when things get to be too much. The floor is very specific. The floor doesn’t move.
His name in the group was listed as R. Pruitt. The profile picture was a dog, some kind of shepherd mix.
I didn’t respond for two days.
What I Did Instead of Responding
I went to work. I’m a dental hygienist, which means I spend eight hours a day with my hands in other people’s mouths and nobody can ask me how I’m doing because they physically cannot talk. It’s the best job for someone who doesn’t want to be asked how they’re doing.
I called Gina and read her the message. She said, “Oh my god, text him back right now.” Gina has been married to the same man for fourteen years and cries at insurance commercials, so she is perhaps not the most calibrated voice on this.
I called Tasha and read her the message. She was quiet for a second and then said, “Huh.” Tasha doesn’t say “huh” lightly.
I looked at R. Pruitt’s Facebook profile, which was mostly private except for the dog photo and a cover image that was just a solid blue. Not a picture. Just the color blue. I don’t know what that means about a person. Probably nothing.
I thought about Dale. I do that constantly, but I mean I specifically thought about what Dale would do in this situation, which is something I do when I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do. Dale would have responded immediately. Dale had no anxiety about reaching out to strangers. He once struck up a forty-minute conversation with a man at a bus stop about regional differences in chili and came home with the guy’s phone number and a recipe for something involving Hatch peppers.
I am not Dale.
But on Saturday morning I typed a response.
What I Wrote
I kept it short because anything longer felt like too much to put on a stranger in a neighborhood Facebook group.
“I’m in the group. Thank you for the message. I’m sorry for making you uncomfortable. My husband passed away two years ago and you looked very much like him. That’s not an excuse, just an explanation. I hope the rest of your laundry came out okay.”
That last line was a mistake. I knew it was a mistake the second I posted it. It’s the kind of thing I do when I’m nervous – make a little joke that doesn’t land, or lands in the wrong place, or makes me sound like I’m not taking something seriously when I am taking it extremely seriously.
I almost deleted the whole thing.
He responded in four minutes.
“The laundry was fine. Thank you for explaining. I lost my wife three years ago. I understand more than I said I did.”
I stared at that for a long time.
R. Pruitt
His name is Roger. He told me that in the second message, after I asked if R stood for anything he went by or if it was one of those initial situations. He said his parents named him Roger because his father was also Roger and his grandfather before that, and he’d spent his whole life mildly resenting it, but at this point he’d been Roger for fifty-one years and it seemed too late to do anything about it.
His wife’s name had been Carol. They’d been together for twenty-two years. She had an aneurysm in the cereal aisle of a Safeway on a Wednesday afternoon and was gone before the ambulance arrived. He’d been the one to find her. He doesn’t go to that Safeway anymore. He drives eleven minutes out of his way to a different one.
He told me that in the third message. I told him about the laundromat in the fourth.
We messaged back and forth for most of Saturday. Not continuously – there were gaps of an hour, sometimes two, where one of us would go do something and come back. But the thread kept going. He was funny in a dry, slightly exhausted way that I recognized because I have become that way too. Grief does something to your sense of humor. It strips out the performative stuff and leaves this flat, dark thing that most people find uncomfortable but that I apparently find very easy to talk to.
He had a shepherd mix named Biscuit. I told him about Dale’s dog, our dog, Ruthie, the beagle who died eight months after Dale. He said, “I’m sorry about Ruthie.” He didn’t say anything else about it and I was grateful for that. Sometimes the right response to a sad thing is just to name it and stop.
Tuesday Again
I almost didn’t go.
I stood in my kitchen at 6:45 Tuesday evening with my laundry bag in my hand and had a full argument with myself about whether going to the laundromat was going to seem like something it wasn’t, or whether it was going to be weird, or whether Roger Pruitt would even be there, or whether I wanted him to be.
The laundry needed doing. That part was real.
I went.
He was already there when I arrived, at the same bank of machines where I’d first seen him. He had the blue laundry bag. Of course he had the blue laundry bag, he always has the blue laundry bag, that’s just his bag.
He looked up when I walked in.
In person, standing still, facing me directly – he didn’t look that much like Dale. The build was similar, yes. The gray at the temples. But his face was different. Longer jaw, different nose, eyes set further apart. He looked like himself.
I don’t know what I’d been following around that laundromat two weeks ago. Some outline I needed to exist for a few more minutes.
He said, “Hey.”
I said, “Hey.”
He gestured at the machine next to him. “This one’s free if you need it.”
I loaded my laundry. He finished folding his. We talked for about twenty minutes, standing between the machines, the dryers going behind us. He told me about his job, something in facilities management for the school district. I told him about the dental hygiene work. He made a face when I described the scraping part and I laughed – actually laughed, out loud, in a way that surprised me.
When his stuff was done he picked up the blue bag and said he’d probably see me next Tuesday.
I said probably yeah.
He left.
I stood there with my laundry still tumbling and thought about Dale, the way I always do in that place. But it was quieter than usual. The specific sharp thing that comes with it was a little less sharp. Not gone. Not even close to gone.
Just – a degree less.
I don’t know what Roger Pruitt is. He’s not a replacement for anything. He’s not a sign. He’s a man named Roger who goes to the same laundromat on Tuesdays and lost someone he loved and drives eleven minutes out of his way to avoid a Safeway.
My dryer beeped.
I folded my laundry and went home.
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If this one got you somewhere quiet, pass it along to someone who might need it.
For more stories with unexpected turns, check out what happened when my wife saw me walk into the hotel lobby and said, “There’s Something You Don’t Know About the Last Four Years”, or when my son’s coach said it loud enough for the whole section to hear. And you won’t believe what happened when she slid a paper across the desk and I didn’t know what I was looking at.
