Mom Confused When Stranger Insists On Paying For Groceries, Until She Looked Lower

She couldn’t move. Her gaze was glued to the woman. There was something about her that was just… odd. It was the way she paced along the lines of shoppers at the checkout line before she approached her. What was she doing?

Suddenly, a whisper went through the crowd and the jig was up. She knew that she had been fooled, along with all the others at Walmart that day.

Thanksgiving Rush

Kathy Clemons was gearing up for Thanksgiving – and there was a lot of preparation that still had to be done. She had arrived at Walmart early so that she could get all the items on her list.

Her daughters, Paula and Beccy, would be visiting from San Diego and she had wanted everything to be perfect. Only, life had thrown a spanner in the works.

Time With Family

The truth was that Kathy and her husband were struggling. After Victor had been retrenched from his job, they were barely making ends meet. But it was Thanksgiving.

Every year Kathy, in true mom fashion, would pull out all the stops to make the holiday special. It gave her so much joy to see her family’s faces light up when she brought out the golden turkey with all the trimmings – stuffing, her famous homemade cranberry sauce, and an enormous pumpkin pie.

But not this year.

An Odd Encounter

Walmart was teeming with people, all doing their last-minute Thanksgiving shopping. Everywhere Kathy looked, people were jostling each other… filling their carts, bumping her heels, pushing past her.

Squabbles began to break out and the feeling of desperation intensified. Then, she noticed the woman. She was oddly dressed in a long brown coat, walking slowly and deliberately.

As Kathy pushed her cart past the woman and mumbled “excuse me,” she noticed that the strange woman was peering into her shopping cart.

Distracted

But Kathy had other things on her mind that day. Her heart ached as she walked down the aisles, looking at all the things she couldn’t afford. She couldn’t tell her children that it was going to be different this year. She felt like a failure.

But she had other worries, too. The woman’s behavior had unsettled her. As a precaution, she opened up the child’s seat in her shopping cart and carefully placed the purse with her last $50 on top of it – intending to keep a close eye on it.