I Hired A Homeless Man For $10 A Day Out Of Pity. Three Years Later, I Found An $85,000 Check Tucked Inside His Favorite Book. Who Is This Man Really?
“12,000. But Robert, I’m not asking you for—”
“Give me two days,” He said.
Then he left. He didn’t come back that night or the next day.
I started to panic. Had I scared him off? Had talking about money made him uncomfortable?
On the third day, he walked in at 9:00 a.m. like nothing had happened. He was carrying a large envelope.
“Here,” He said, handing it to me.
Inside was a cashier’s check made out to me for $15,000. I felt like the floor had dropped out from under me.
“Robert, where did you get this?”
“I had some savings.”
“Savings? You’ve been living in my storage room for three years. You don’t even take a proper salary. Where could you possibly—”
“I had some money set aside,” He said quietly.
“From before. Please, Margaret, take it. Save your house.”
I was staring at the check, my mind racing. None of this made sense.
“Robert, who are you?”
He looked at me for a long moment, then he sighed.
“Someone who needed to disappear for a while. Someone who needed to remember what mattered.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know, but it’s all I can give you right now. Please take the money. We can talk about the rest later.”
I wanted to push. I wanted to demand answers.
But I also needed to save my house. So I took the check.
I deposited it the next day and paid off the mortgage arrears. I had 3,000 left over to keep the store running another few months.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That night, after Robert had gone to sleep in the back room, I did something I’m not proud of.
I went through his things. I found the backpack he’d had that first day tucked under his cot.
Inside was a worn leather wallet. Inside the wallet were three things: a driver’s license, a faded photograph, and a business card.
The driver’s license said Robert David Chen, age 57, an address in Seattle, Washington. The photograph showed a younger Robert, maybe in his 40s, standing with a beautiful Asian woman and two teenage children, a boy and a girl.
They were all smiling, standing in front of what looked like a college campus. The business card said, “Robert D. Chen, Chief Executive Officer, Lighthouse Publishing Group.”
I sat down hard on the concrete floor. Lighthouse Publishing Group.
I knew that name. Everyone in the book business knew that name.
They were one of the largest independent publishers in the country. They’d been bought out by a major conglomerate five or six years ago in a deal worth hundreds of millions.
Robert wasn’t just some man who’d fallen on hard times. Robert was rich, or had been.
And he’d been lying to me for three years. I felt betrayed, angry, and confused.
Why would someone with that kind of background be sleeping on a cot in a bookstore storage room? Why would he work for $10 a day when he clearly didn’t need the money?
I put everything back exactly as I’d found it. I went home and didn’t sleep.
The next morning, I confronted him.
“Lighthouse Publishing,” I said as soon as he walked in.
“You were the CEO.”
His face went pale. He didn’t deny it.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He sat down heavily on one of the reading chairs.
“Because I didn’t want you to look at me differently. I didn’t want you to treat me differently.”
“Robert, I’ve been paying you $10 a day. You’ve been sleeping in a storage room. I’ve been making you sandwiches and worrying about whether you had enough to eat.”
“And all this time…”
“All this time, I was exactly where I needed to be,” He said softly.
“That’s not an explanation.”
“No, you’re right. You deserve the truth.”
He took a deep breath.
“The woman in the photograph, that was my wife Linda. The kids were our son and daughter, James and Emily.”
“Six years ago, they were driving home from Emily’s college orientation. A drunk driver ran a red light and killed all three of them instantly.”
I felt my anger drain away.
“Oh, Robert. I’m so sorry.”
“I fell apart after that. Completely fell apart. I sold the company three months later, got $240 million, and didn’t care. Couldn’t care. Money meant nothing when everything that mattered was gone.”
He was staring at his hands.
“I bought a big house in Seattle and filled it with their things, their photographs. I sat there alone for two years, drinking myself to death.”
“My doctor said if I didn’t stop, I’d be dead within a year.”
“What changed?”
“I left. Just walked out one day. Left everything: the house, the cars, the bank accounts.”
“I kept one account with enough money to survive on, set up automatic payments for property taxes and bills, and disappeared.”
“I wanted to find out if I could still be a person without all the trappings of success. Without the money, the status, the recognition.”
He looked up at me.
“I ended up in Portland. Slept on the streets for three weeks. Then I found your bookstore. Found you.”
“And for the first time in years, I felt like I had a reason to wake up in the morning.”
I sat down across from him.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because you treated me like a human being. Not like a CEO. Not like a grieving widower. Not like a rich man slumming it for some ego trip.”
“You just treated me like Robert. Like someone who needed help and deserved a chance. Do you know how rare that is?”
“But Robert, I could have helped you more if I’d known.”
“I didn’t need more help. I needed exactly what you gave me: purpose, routine, a reason to get up, and someone who depended on me.”
“That’s worth more than all the money in my accounts.”
We sat in silence for a while.
“So the $15,000,” I finally said.
“Is nothing, Margaret. I could write you a check for a million dollars and not even notice it’s gone. But that’s not what you need from me, and it’s not what this relationship is about.”
“Then what is it about?”
He smiled sadly.
“It’s about two people who lost their way finding each other. It’s about discovering that value isn’t measured in dollars.”
“It’s about family. The family we choose when the family we had is gone.”
I felt tears running down my face.
“My husband died three years ago from cancer. And my daughter keeps telling me to give up the store, move to Florida, and stop fighting so hard to keep something that’s dying.”
