I unwrapped that old store receipt right there on my sideboard, and I had to sit down, because inside was a folded paper and a little brass key, and the paper was a savings passbook with my name written across the top in old Mr. Pruitts hand.
Mr. Pruitt gave me my first job at that hardware store when I was sixteen, back in 1961. What I never knew, until I opened that register fifty-odd years later, was what he had quietly done for me the whole time I worked there, and for every young person he ever hired.
The passbook was a savings account. Mr. Pruitt had opened it in my name and, out of the store profits, put a little into it every payday I worked for him, on top of my wages, without ever telling me. A few dollars at a time. He did it for every kid who ever rang that brass bell, a hidden nest egg none of us knew we had.
The note explained it. He wrote that most of the young people who worked for him came from families with nothing, and that he wanted each of them to walk away from that store with a little something saved that they could not fritter away because they never knew it was there.
For fifty-six years old Mr. Pruitt secretly saved money in the names of the teenagers who worked for him, poor kids most of them, hiding the passbooks in the register so that one day, when the store closed and a repairman opened the works, each of them would find that a quiet old man had been building them a future all along.
His note said: You worked hard and you deserved more than I could pay you honestly. So I paid you the rest into this, where you could not spend it foolish. It is not much. But it is yours, and it always was, and I hope it comes to you at a time you need it.
The account, with fifty years of interest, had grown to more than I would have guessed. And there was a key, to a drawer in the back that held more passbooks, dozens of them, for every kid who ever worked there.
So I have spent this winter tracking them down, gray-haired now like me, and telling them that old Mr. Pruitt had been saving for them since they were sixteen. Grown men and women have wept in their kitchens learning that a quiet shopkeeper loved them enough to build them a savings they never knew about.
I bought back the old brass register because the drawer stuck. It held the secret generosity of one man toward every poor kid who ever worked for him, and I have been the one lucky enough to hand each of them the future he saved.