|
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) -- The young father stood in line at the
Kmart layaway counter, wearing dirty clothes and worn-out boots. With him
were three small children.
He asked to pay something on his bill because he knew he
wouldn't be able to afford it all before Christmas. Then a mysterious woman
stepped up to the counter.
"She told him, `No, I'm paying for it,'" recalled
Edna Deppe, assistant manager at the store in Indianapolis. "He just
stood there and looked at her and then looked at me and asked if it was a
joke. I told him it wasn't, and that she was going to pay for him. And he
just busted out in tears."
At Kmart stores across the country, Santa seems to be getting
some help: Anonymous donors are paying off strangers' layaway accounts,
buying the Christmas gifts other families couldn't afford, especially toys
and children's clothes set aside by impoverished parents.
Before she left the store Tuesday evening, the Indianapolis
woman in her mid-40s had paid the layaway orders for as many as 50 people.
On the way out, she handed out $50 bills and paid for two carts of toys for
a woman in line at the cash register.
"She was doing it in the memory of her husband who had
just died, and she said she wasn't going to be able to spend it and wanted
to make people happy with it," Deppe said. The woman did not identify
herself and only asked people to "remember Ben," an apparent
reference to her husband.
Deepe, who said she's worked in retail for 40 years, had never
seen anything like it.
"It was like an angel fell out of the sky and appeared in
our store," she said.
Most of the donors have done their giving secretly.
Dona Bremser, an Omaha nurse, was at work when a Kmart employee
called to tell her that someone had paid off the $70 balance of her layaway
account, which held nearly $200 in toys for her 4-year-old son."I was speechless," Bremser said. "It made me
believe in Christmas again. More
|
