The Stranger Who Paid The Layaway

Keeping the secret

I counted it while he stood there. It was three hundred and twenty dollars, more than the balance, in worn twenties.

I told him he had given me too much. He told me to put the rest on whichever one was furthest behind.

I started writing in the book. Paid in full. Paid in full. Fourteen times, going down the page, and my throat got tight somewhere around the eighth one.

While I wrote he turned to go, and that is when I asked him the question that a person asks. I asked him his name, so I could tell the mothers who had done it.

He stopped with his back to me. He stood there a long moment.

Then he turned around, and for the first time he looked me full in the face, and his eyes were wet.

“That is the one thing I will ask you,” he said. “Do not say my name. Do not even say it was a man. Let them think it was the store, or the Lord, or nobody at all.”

I told him the mothers would want to thank somebody.

“Then let them thank each other,” he said. “Someday.”

And he put his hat back on and walked out into the wind, and the bell swung, and he was gone down the square and I never saw which way he turned.

I kept that promise for a long, long time.

That evening I called the mothers one by one off the numbers in the book. I told each of them the same thing. Your layaway is settled. It is a gift. There is no name on it. Come take the coat home.

I will never forget those phone calls as long as I live.

The woman from the canning plant did not say anything at all for a while. Then she asked me, real careful, if I was sure, if there had not been a mistake.

I told her there was no mistake. The snowsuit was hers.

Another one, a young mother out east of town, started crying so hard she had to set the phone down.

One of them, a proud woman who never took a thing from anybody, got angry first, the way proud people do, and asked who had done it so she could pay them back. I told her honestly that I could not say.

Then her voice broke and she said thank you, thank you, over and over, and I stood there in the dark store holding the phone and crying right along with her.