He had been driving a cab in Brooklyn for nineteen years. She got into his backseat twice in one week.
The yellow cab that Marcus Halloran had been driving since 2006 was a 2018 Ford Escape hybrid that had replaced the 2011 Crown Victoria he had driven for seven years before. The Crown Victoria had been retired in 2019, when its odometer had finally crossed four hundred thousand miles and the medallion company had insisted, gently but firmly, that the time had come. He had driven the Escape ever since. He worked twelve-hour shifts, four nights a week, from six in the evening until six in the morning. He lived in Sheepshead Bay with his wife Aileen and their fifteen-year-old daughter Mary. He had been, for nineteen years, the kind of working-class New York City man whose adult life was a long quiet rotation of fares, sleep, and Sunday breakfasts with his family.
He had picked up, in his nineteen years, somewhere on the order of three hundred and fifty thousand passengers. He had developed, in those years, the small particular memory that experienced taxi drivers develop — a memory not for names, which passengers rarely give, but for faces, voices, manner, and the small particular weather of how a person carries themselves in the backseat of a car for the duration of a short urban ride.
He remembered her because of the bag.
She had gotten into his cab on a Thursday evening in early September, at the corner of Court Street and Atlantic Avenue, at seven-forty in the evening. She had been thirty-four or thirty-five — Marcus, by professional habit, did not guess ages too narrowly — with brown hair pulled back, a soft gray cardigan over a navy blue dress, and a small dark leather tote bag slung over her left shoulder. She had been holding the tote against her side with a protective tightness that suggested the bag held something fragile.
She had given him an address on Cumberland Street in Fort Greene. The ride had taken twelve minutes. She had paid by card. She had tipped twenty percent. She had said thank you in a small clear voice and gotten out at the curb. Marcus had watched her in the rearview as she had walked, holding the tote bag against her side in the same protective way, up the steps of a small brownstone with a careful black iron railing.
He had not, in the moment, thought anything more about her. She had been one of approximately forty fares that night.
She had gotten into his cab again four nights later, on Monday at eight-fifteen in the evening, at the corner of Smith Street and Pacific Street, holding the same dark leather tote in the same protective way.
II. The second ride.
He recognized her immediately. The recognition was, by his own description, not a slow dawning kind of recognition. It was the immediate kind — the kind that happens when an experienced driver has, by professional habit, noticed a small particular passenger and stored her without realizing he was storing her.
She did not, by any visible sign, recognize him.
“Where to, ma’am?” he asked.
She gave him an address on St. Marks Avenue in Crown Heights. He typed it into the GPS. He pulled away from the curb.
He glanced at her in the rearview. She was sitting in the same posture she had been in on Thursday — leaning slightly forward, holding the tote bag against her side. She was wearing different clothes — a black sweater over jeans tonight — but the bag was the same, and the protective grip was the same.
He did not, in the way that some drivers might have, say anything about the previous ride. He had been driving long enough to know that small comments about prior fares, even friendly ones, made some passengers uncomfortable. He drove. He let her sit. He kept the radio on the low jazz station he had been keeping it on for nineteen years.
About four minutes into the ride, she spoke.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I am sorry — this is a strange question. Have you driven me before?”
He looked at her in the rearview. She was looking at the back of his head with the small uncertain expression of a person who had been working out a small private intuition.
“I have, ma’am. Thursday evening. From Court and Atlantic.”
She nodded slowly. She looked out the window for a moment.
“I thought so. I am sorry. I do not — I am not, in any usual sense, a person who remembers the cab she takes. But I had the same feeling getting in this evening that I had on Thursday, and I thought it was just a coincidence, but then I realized you had the same — the same small soft jazz station. I noticed it on Thursday too.”
“WQXR,” he said. “I have had it on since 2006.”
She laughed, very softly. It was the small kind of laugh that careful tired women in their mid-thirties make when they are too tired to manufacture a bigger one.
“Of course,” she said. “That makes sense.”
There was a small pause. She looked at the bag in her lap. She looked back up.
“Could I ask you something?” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“This is going to sound strange. But — would you, by any chance, be available to drive a specific route for me, on specific nights, for the next several weeks? I would pay you directly. I would not, in any way, want you to take any other fares during the route. I would pay you for the full hour.”
III. The proposal.
He pulled the cab over.
He did not, in the way that some drivers might have, pull over dramatically. He pulled over at the next available curb, which happened to be a long quiet block on Atlantic between Underhill and Vanderbilt, and he put the cab in park, and he turned around in his seat to look at her properly.
She was, by every visible sign, not the kind of passenger who proposed unusual arrangements to her taxi driver. She was, by every visible sign, an ordinary professional woman in her mid-thirties who was, by some small private circumstance, in the middle of asking a stranger for an unusual kind of help. She had the small uncertain weather of a person who had not, by recent private experience, asked very many people for help and who was not, in the moment, sure how the request was going to be received.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I would like to be helpful. But I am going to need you to explain a little more before I can say yes or no.”
She nodded. She held the tote bag a little tighter.
“My mother,” she said carefully, “has stage-four pancreatic cancer. She lives in a small apartment on St. Marks Avenue in Crown Heights — the apartment I was just headed to. She does not have very much time. The doctors have told us perhaps another three or four months.”
She paused.
“I have been bringing her dinner every night since she got out of the hospital in late August. I cook the dinner at my apartment in Fort Greene. I bring it to her in a small warming bag” — she gestured at the tote — “because the small warming bag was the only one I could find that fit the small containers I have been using. I have been doing this for almost six weeks. I have been taking a cab each way because — because I do not want to spend the subway time worrying about whether the food will get cold.”
She paused again.
“The cab fares are — they are adding up. I have been spending almost three hundred dollars a week on the round trips. I am, by my own honest accounting, in no financial position to keep this up. I had been thinking, on the subway ride home from her place on Saturday evening, that I was going to have to stop doing the nightly thing and switch to every other night or every third night.”
She looked at the tote bag.
“And then I got in your cab tonight. And I recognized the jazz station. And I thought — I thought that maybe there might be a way to make a arrangement with the same driver. So that the trip cost less. And so that — so that the trip was not, each time, with a new stranger.”
She looked up at him.
“I would pay you a fair hourly rate. I would not — I would not, in any way, want to take advantage of your time. But I would like, if you would consider it, to have the same driver for the next several weeks.”
Marcus looked at her. He looked at the careful tote bag. He looked at the small steady weather of the careful tired woman in his backseat.
He thought about his own mother, who had died of a slow form of leukemia in 2014 in a small apartment in the Belmont section of the Bronx. He thought about the small nightly trips he had made, for almost two months, between his cab shifts, to bring her the small containers of food his wife Aileen had cooked for her in the pre-dawn hours after he had finished his shifts.
He thought about the small weight of the small warming bag in his own hand, on the small elevator up to his mother’s small apartment, during the long careful summer of 2014.
He looked back at the woman in his backseat.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I think we can work something out.”
IV. The arrangement.
The arrangement they worked out was straightforward. Marcus would pick her up at the corner of Carlton Avenue and DeKalb Avenue in Fort Greene, two blocks from her apartment, at seven-forty-five every evening. He would drive her, on the small route they had now established, to the small apartment building on St. Marks Avenue in Crown Heights. He would wait outside, in his cab, with the meter off, for forty minutes — the average amount of time her visits with her mother had been taking. He would then drive her back to the corner of Carlton and DeKalb. The total elapsed time, by their arithmetic, would be approximately one hour and ten minutes per night.
She would pay him, by his careful estimate, the equivalent of what he would have made on his usual fare load during that hour — approximately fifty-five dollars per night, cash. The total weekly cost to her, by her subsequent arithmetic, would be approximately a hundred and ten dollars less than what she had been paying in separate cab fares.
The total cost to him, in lost potential fares, would be negligible. The hour between seven-forty-five and nine in the evening was, by his long professional experience, a small slow window in the cab business — the dinner rush had typically ended, and the bar-and-restaurant pickups had not yet begun. He had been, on most weeknights of his nineteen years, between fares during that hour anyway.
He started the next night.
V. The ten weeks.
He drove her to her mother’s apartment every night for ten weeks.
He did not, in those ten weeks, miss a single night. He had not, by his own private decision, told his wife Aileen about the small private arrangement until the second week — not because he was hiding it, but because he had wanted to be sure, by his own careful internal accounting, that he was doing the right thing before he asked her to also do it. Aileen had listened to him at the small kitchen table on a Sunday morning. She had nodded. She had said only: Good. Bring her some of the soup I make on Wednesdays.
He brought the soup the next Wednesday, in a small plastic container Aileen had packed for him. He gave it to the woman — whose name, he had by then learned, was Hannah Patel — at the corner of Carlton and DeKalb when she got into his cab. He told her his wife had made it. He told her his wife had wanted her mother to have some.
Hannah had not, in the moment, been able to say anything. She had, by the small look on her face in the rearview mirror, simply held the small container in her lap for the entire careful ride to Crown Heights.
The next morning, when he picked her up, she handed him a small folded napkin with the soup container. The napkin had a small handwritten note on it. The note said only: My mother and I have been eating it together. She has been asking, please, for the recipe. — H.
Aileen wrote out the recipe that Saturday morning on a small index card. Marcus delivered it on Sunday evening.
VI. The end.
Hannah’s mother passed away on a Tuesday evening in November, six weeks into the ten weeks I am describing. The death itself happened not in the small St. Marks Avenue apartment but at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, where she had been admitted on the previous Friday after a slow decline.
Hannah did not, in the moment, call Marcus.
She had, by then, his cell phone number — they had exchanged it in the second week, by careful mutual decision, in case the schedule needed to be adjusted on any given evening. But she did not, on the Tuesday evening, call him. She was, by her own later description, in the kind of small private grief that does not, in the immediate hours, know how to reach out.
She called him on Wednesday morning, at seven-thirty, just as he was finishing his shift. She told him, in a small voice that was holding itself together with what was clearly the last of its careful resources, that her mother had passed away the previous evening, and that she would not, that night or any of the following nights, need a ride to Crown Heights.
She thanked him.
He told her, in his working-class Brooklyn voice, that he was sorry for her loss. He told her, in the small honest way he had developed over nineteen years of cab driving, that if there was anything he or his wife could do, she should call. He told her he would, in the spirit of the small arrangement they had developed, not be billing her for the remainder of the week.
She tried to argue. He did not let her argue. He said only, in the small firm way he had heard his own father use when his father had been arranging small things for grieving families in the Belmont section of the Bronx in the careful nineteen-seventies: No, ma’am. This part is on me.
VII. The memorial.
The memorial service was held on the following Saturday at a small Brooklyn funeral home in Park Slope. Marcus did not, by his own initial assumption, expect to be invited. He was, by every careful protocol, simply the taxi driver who had been doing the small nightly arrangement.
He received a small invitation by mail on Thursday morning. The invitation, in Hannah’s small handwriting, said only: Please come. You knew my mother in a way the rest of the family did not. — H.
He went. He brought Aileen. They sat in the small back row.
He learned, in the small service, that Hannah’s mother had been named Devika Patel, that she had emigrated from Gujarat to Brooklyn in 1972, that she had worked as a small pediatric nurse at NewYork-Presbyterian for thirty-four years before her retirement in 2010, and that she had been, in the private description of her three grown children, the small gravitational center of a small family that did not, in any usual sense, know how to imagine a household without her.
He learned, in the small eulogy that Hannah delivered, that Devika had, in her last six weeks, been telling Hannah small private things about Marcus — about the jazz station, about the soup, about the small working-class Brooklyn voice that Hannah had been bringing home to her apartment in the small soft hours of late evening for ten weeks.
Devika had, in her small final weeks, told Hannah that she had wanted to meet the small driver.
She had not, by the careful sad arithmetic of cancer schedules, had the chance.
VIII. Why it stays.
I sat with Marcus and Aileen Halloran in the small kitchen of their house in Sheepshead Bay in February, three months after the small memorial in Park Slope. The house was the small working-class kind of Brooklyn home that had been, for nineteen years, the small base of operations of a small taxi-driver family. There were small photographs of their daughter Mary on the refrigerator. There was a small prayer card from Devika Patel’s funeral, tucked into the corner of the small frame around a careful photograph of Marcus’s mother, on the small side table by the door.
Hannah Patel had become, in the small months since the funeral, a small friend of the family. She had, by her own description, no surviving immediate family in New York — her father had passed away in 2018, her two brothers lived in California and London, and her own marriage had ended kindly in 2022. She had, by small invitation, joined the Hallorans for Christmas Eve dinner. She had also, by small mutual decision, begun to take Aileen out, once a month, for a small Saturday afternoon lunch at a small Indian restaurant on Coney Island Avenue that Devika had loved.
Marcus is still driving. He is fifty-four. He intends, by his own working-class arithmetic, to drive for another six to eight years before he and Aileen retire to the small house in County Mayo that his sister-in-law has been renting on their behalf for the last twelve years.
He had not, in nineteen years of cab driving, ever made a small private arrangement of the kind he made with Hannah Patel. He has not, in the year since, made another one. He told me, when I asked him why he had said yes that Monday night on Atlantic Avenue between Underhill and Vanderbilt, that the small reason was simple. He had recognized, in the small tired weather of the woman in his backseat, the small tired weather of the man he had himself been in the careful summer of 2014.
“I knew that bag,” he said. “I had carried that bag myself, in the careful Bronx, ten years ago. The bag was my mother. I could see Hannah was carrying the same bag. I was not, in any sense, going to leave that bag in the back of a different cab every night.”
Across the United States, in working-class cabs and small soup containers and soft jazz stations that have been playing for nineteen years, small kindnesses are quietly being arranged by drivers and waitresses and pharmacists and the ordinary working people who do, in the long quiet weather of American kindness, the work of carrying each other’s grief through long nights. For broader context on the long tradition of immigrant family life in New York City, readers can spend time with the long-form material at the Smithsonian Magazine or the archives at the Library of Congress. The Chapbook keeps its narratives clean, human, and responsible — read more in the Editorial Policy.
The jazz station, in the small 2018 Ford Escape hybrid that Marcus Halloran drives four nights a week through the small streets of Brooklyn, is still on. It has been, by his small private decision, on since 2006.
It will be on, by his small private intention, for as long as he is driving.
