I was ushered into a small office behind the customer service counter. The manager — a middle-aged woman with kind eyes — sat across from me and gently asked, “Where did you get this card?”
I told her it had belonged to my grandmother, Margaret Harper.
“You don’t know, do you?” she asked softly.
I shook my head, confused.
Then she told me something I will never forget.
Your grandmother was one of our “Silent Angels,” she said.
Over the last several years, my grandmother had been quietly purchasing gift cards from that very store — sometimes $20, sometimes $50, occasionally more — and leaving them with store employees with simple instructions: Give this to someone who needs it. But don’t tell them who it’s from.
She never wanted credit. Never signed her name. She’d quietly slip the card to a cashier or customer service worker, point to a mother struggling to count change, or a tired-looking man at the checkout, and say, “Please — just make sure they get this.”
She came in regularly, always modestly dressed, always polite, always a bit mysterious. They called her The Angel in Disguise.
And the card I held — the one I had planned to regift or toss — was the last one she ever bought.
