The Waitress Who Split Her Tips With a Homeless Man in 2011 Just Got a Call From His Attorney
*Margaret,*
*I have been keeping track of you.*
*I want you to know that before I tell you the rest, because I don’t want you to feel that anything was done behind your back.
It was.
But I want to be honest about it now.*
*After I got well, I hired a man to find out what had happened to the waitress in the green apron.
It took him two days.
Cedar Falls is not a big town.*
*He told me that in the spring of 2012, about the time I left, your husband Ray had a stroke.
A small one.
He recovered but he could not go back to work at John Deere.
He told me you had taken a second job at the hospital laundry.
He told me your son was still at Iowa State and you were paying for it out of pocket, one semester at a time.*
*I want you to know that I sat in my kitchen in West Des Moines and I cried, Margaret.
Because in October of 2011, when you gave me oatmeal, you had a husband who could not work and a son in college and you were three months behind on your mortgage.
I know because I asked Douglas to check.*
*And you gave me twenty dollars of your tips.*
—
*I could not walk up to your door and give you money.
I understood that instinctively.
You would not have taken it.
You would have been embarrassed and you would have stopped answering the door and I would have taken something from you instead of giving you something.*
*So I did other things.*
*In August of 2013, the Cedar Falls Community Foundation received an anonymous donation of twelve thousand dollars, earmarked for the tuition of one Kevin Delaney, Iowa State University, mechanical engineering.
They contacted you and told you it was a scholarship for the child of a laid-off John Deere employee.*
*Kevin received similar grants for the next two years until he graduated.
The total was thirty-eight thousand dollars.*
*In November of 2015, the mortgage on your home was quietly purchased by a small investment trust and the interest rate was renegotiated to two percent.
You would have noticed your monthly payment dropped by three hundred and eleven dollars.
Your bank told you it was a federal refinancing program for homeowners over fifty-five.*
*I am telling you this so you understand.
There was no federal program.*
—
*When Ray passed in 2020, I read his obituary in the Waterloo Courier.
I did not attend the service.
I did not think that was my place.
I sent flowers under the name of a former coworker of Ray’s at John Deere, a man named Bill Hoefer who Ray had worked with in the eighties.
Bill is real.
He agreed to let me use his name.
He is a good man.*
*The casket you chose, Margaret, the oak one with the brass handles.
That casket cost four thousand dollars more than the one the funeral home director initially recommended.
When you asked how the family could afford the nicer one, he told you a portion had been covered by a veterans’ benefit Ray had never used.*
*Ray was not a veteran.
I know you know that.
I have wondered for four years whether you figured out somebody was watching over you and simply chose not to say anything.*
*I hope you did.
I hope some part of you knew you were not as alone as you felt.*
—
I stopped reading.
I put the letter down on the kitchen table and I sat there in the quiet, and I thought about the day of Ray’s funeral.
I thought about how I had stood in the funeral home office looking at the price list and how the director, Bob Aldrich, had come out from the back and told me not to worry about it, that some of it was already covered.
And I had thought at the time that Bob was being kind because his son had gone to school with Kevin.
I thought about the letter Iowa State had sent Kevin in the fall of 2013.
I still had it in a manila envelope in my file cabinet.
I had told everyone at church that God had provided.
I got up and I got the envelope out of the file cabinet and I looked at it again.
The letter was signed by a scholarship coordinator whose name I could no longer read the signature on.
I sat back down and I finished the letter.
—
*The last thing, Margaret, is what I have left you personally.*
*Douglas will tell you the details but I want to tell you the reason.*
*I have left you six million dollars.*
*I know that number is going to frighten you.
I know you are going to want to say no.
Please listen to me before you decide.*
*You are sixty-two years old.
You have worked since you were sixteen.
You work at a hospital laundry and you come home to an empty house and you eat dinner alone and on Sundays your son calls you from Phoenix and you tell him you are fine.*
*You are not fine, Margaret.
Nobody who has worked as hard as you have is fine at sixty-two.
Your body is tired.
Your knees hurt.
I know because mine did.*
*I am not giving you this money because I owe you.
I do owe you, but that is not why.*
*I am giving you this money because when I sat on that bench in October of 2011, I was a man who had forty-two million dollars in the bank and had decided that nothing was worth staying alive for.
And a woman who had eleven dollars in her checking account bought me oatmeal and told me it was cold.*
*You taught me, without meaning to, what money is for.*
*It is for oatmeal.
It is for keeping people warm.
It is for handing to somebody who needs it more than you do without asking them to explain themselves.*
*I have spent thirteen years trying to do with my forty-two million what you did with your forty-one dollars in tips.
I am still not as good at it as you were on your worst morning at the Blue Plate Diner.*
*Do not give the six million to the foundation.
The foundation has enough.
This is for you.
Retire.
Fix your knees.
See your son.
Buy a plane ticket.
Buy two.*
*And if you take the chair on the board, and I hope you will, come tell the other board members what it feels like to have eleven dollars and give some of them away.
Because none of them know.
They have all been rich their whole lives.
They need you.*
*I need you to say yes, Margaret.
This is the last thing I will ever ask of you.*
*Your friend on the bench,*
*Harold*
—
I sat on my kitchen floor and I cried for a long time.
When I could stand up again I went to the closet and I got out the Christmas card with the snowman on it.
I had kept it for thirteen years because at the time it had felt like the only thing anyone had given me that year that wasn’t a bill.
I put it on the kitchen table next to the letter.
Then I called my son.
—