…the cavity was packed, top to bottom, with tiny folded slips of paper. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe. And when I unfolded the first one, I understood what I was holding, and I had to sit down on the garage floor.
Each slip was a child’s wish, in a child’s handwriting.
The old man who ran that five-and-dime, I’d learn, had a ritual going back fifty years. For a penny you got a gumball — but he’d also lean down and ask each child, quiet, just between them, “And what do you wish for?” Then he’d write it on a slip and drop it into the belly of that machine, like a wishing well. “A red bicycle.” “For my daddy to come home.” “A winter coat that isn’t my brother’s.” “For Mama to stop being sick.”
And on a great many of them, in his own faded pencil, was a single added word: DONE.
He’d been quietly making them come true. The bicycle that appeared under a poor family’s tree. The coat that showed up on a cold porch with no name on it. The doctor’s bill that got mysteriously paid. A childless old candy man had spent fifty years being the secret wish-granter of an entire town, and never once let a soul know it was him.
I took the slips to the county paper. Grown men and women — sixty, seventy years old now — came to read them, and more than one found their own childhood wish in that pile, in their own small hand, marked DONE, and finally understood who to thank.
They nearly scrapped a dusty old gumball machine for the metal — never guessing it held fifty years of a lonely candy man’s greatest secret: an entire town’s childhood wishes, and the quiet, anonymous granting of every one he could reach.