CLT restroom attendant needed $1,071 for new teeth. Then an angel walked out of the stall.
You might not expect someone who spends her workdays cleaning bathrooms used by hundreds of people an hour to say that they love their job, but when Frances Ross says she loves working for ABM Janitorial Services at Charlotte Douglas International Airport, she sure sounds like she means it.
“Oh yes, yes sir. All the years I done worked, this the best job I like,” said Ross, a 73-year-old grandmother and lifelong Charlotte resident who has worked for ABM for the past five years. “And I told them, I’m not going nowhere. I’m gonna be here till God call me home.”
But no matter how much longer she stays with the company, she most likely will never have another on-the-job experience like the one she had last month, when a chance meeting with a big-hearted flight attendant solved a thousand-dollar dental headache for Ross in a matter of minutes.
Here’s the story of how this random act of kindness unfolded, based on conversations with both women involved, and how — much to their delight — it has inspired others to be equally kind and generous.
The meeting in the restroom
Prieska Outland has been a flight attendant for American Airlines for 6-1/2 years. She lives in Atlanta, but she also has a place in Charlotte since CLT is a hub for American and, as such, it’s often easier for her to crash here right before or right after a flight.
On the morning of Friday, July 23, she had deplaned in Charlotte with a full bladder after working a flight from Dallas and was heading down the escalators to catch a city bus to her local residence. She briefly thought about trying to hold it, but ultimately decided to stop at the last possible restroom.
Although a “Caution - Wet Floor” sign was posted at the entrance, the floor looked dry to her, so she went around it and into the restroom — where she found a masked-up older woman in the middle of performing a cleaning.
“The bathroom’s closed,” the woman informed Outland.
Outland apologized but said, “I really gotta go right now. I will make it quick.”
After Outland came out of the stall and started washing her hands, the woman explained it was her third time cleaning this particular restroom on that particular morning, and remarked about how careless and thoughtless travelers could be when using the facilities. All Outland noticed, though, was how clean the area looked and how fresh it smelled.
So Outland reached into her bag and pulled out a $20 bill — one that an elderly couple had stuffed in her hand and refused to take back after she’d made them feel comfortable on a flight a month earlier. She always intended to use the cash to pay it forward. This, she thought, was her chance.
“Here,” Outland told her. “I want you to know that I appreciate you. I know it’s a tough job. So I want you to have this.”
The cleaning woman held the bill out in front of her with two hands and stared at it. For a moment, she didn’t say anything. Then tears started forming in her eyes.
Finally, the woman said to Outland, “You just don’t know. This is amazing. You gave it to somebody who really needed this.”
The voice inside her head
The woman proceeded to explain to Outland that she had just gotten her four front teeth pulled, and to prove it, she lowered the mask she was wearing and opened her mouth.
“This money,” the woman said, her voice breaking with emotion, “can go into my teeth savings. I had $41 saved, and now I got $61. I’m almost gettin’ there.”
Suddenly, Outland felt like she was going to cry, because the woman was so grateful for what to the giver had seemed like a small amount of money. On top of that, it pained Outland to think about this woman being deprived of the teeth that complete a proper smile.
“How much are you trying to save?” Outland asked.
“A thousand and 71 dollars,” the woman replied.
Uhh, she’s not almost there, Outland thought. And in the next instant, Outland was blindsided by a voice in her head that said, simply: “Pay it.”
The woman continued talking about her situation, but Outland couldn’t really make out what she was saying. It’s not that she wasn’t listening; it’s just that the voice in her head was drowning out everything else as it repeated those words over and over again.
At first, Outland didn’t know exactly what she was supposed to do. This was a total stranger, and Outland couldn’t stand around in the restroom all day, so she decided to get the name off of the woman’s badge — it was Frances Ross — and ask for her cellphone number, thinking that way at least she’d be able to track her down if she could think of a way to help a little more.
Then Outland offered some words of support to Ross before starting to leave. But before Outland got all the way out of the restroom, she spun on her heels.
“Uh, Miss Frances, what dentist do you go to?” she asked.
“Baby, I go to the dentist right down the street, right by Walmart,” said Ross, who thought the flight attendant was just looking for a recommendation. She couldn’t remember the name of the place, but Outland did a little Googling and they figured it out pretty quickly.
After Outland made note of it, they said goodbye to each other.
As she walked out to catch her bus, the voice in Outland’s head grew louder. And clearer. By the time she climbed aboard and took her seat, it was suddenly obvious to Outland what she was supposed to do.
The settling of the bill
Outland works full-time as a flight attendant, but she also is a real-estate investor, an actress and a fitness instructor. So she has multiple sources of income, and while $1,071 was hardly nothing to her, giving up that amount to a stranger in need also wasn’t going to break the bank.
As the bus took her from the airport to her place in Charlotte, she called Ross’s dentist’s office, persuaded a staff member to look up Ross’s billing info (by saying she intended to immediately pay for Ross’s needs — removable partial dentures for her upper teeth), and confirmed the amount owed.
As soon as she got off the bus, she started crying. She’s not sure why. But through tears, she called back and gave the office her credit card number right over the phone to cover the $1,071 bill.
A few minutes later, back at the airport, Ross’s phone rang.
She didn’t recognize the number, but she answered it anyway.
“Miss Frances?” the voice on the other end said. “Hi, this is Prieska.”
“Who?” Ross asked.
“Prieska. You know, the flight attendant you just met in the bathroom. Sooooo ... I just wanted you to know, you can go ahead and set your appointment and get your teeth fixed.”
“What?” Ross asked. She paused. Then, again: “What??”
“Yeah,” Outland repeated, “go ahead and make your appointment to go get your teeth fixed. Your dentist bill has been paid in full.”
For several seconds, there was silence on Ross’s end. Then she started sobbing loudly into the phone.
“Baby, no, no, no, you didn’t have to do this, you didn’t have to do this,” Ross wailed, through tears, while standing in the middle of a public restroom at the airport. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Thank you so much. Thank you. You just don’t know what you have done for me. How can I ever repay you? What can I do to repay you?”
Outland started crying again, too, before saying: “Nothing. Just go get your teeth fixed, be kind and have an awesome day.”
The start of ‘a wave of something’?
Several hours later, around dinnertime, Outland posted about her experience on social media in the hopes of inspiring others with a simple message: “At the end of the day,” she told the Observer this week, “everybody wants to feel appreciated — whether you are rich or poor.”
In this case, yes, money was involved, but, she added, “it doesn’t cost us anything to be kind to people.”
“I felt so good that I had done that for this person,” Outland said, once again fighting back tears as she spoke. “I don’t know what made me do it. It wasn’t a stunt or anything. It was just I wanted to show this person who appreciated the smallest little thing that you could be blessed with something even more. If you could just appreciate the smallest little thing and keep doing your best and keep pushing through ... God is gonna take care of you.”
Two days later, Ross called Outland to thank her profusely, again, before going to her church’s Sunday morning service, during which she would get up in front of the congregation and share the story of Outland’s kindness.
“She’s my angel, yes, she is,” Ross said Tuesday, explaining to the Observer what she’d explained to her fellow parishioners two Sundays ago. “God sent me an angel. That’s all I can say. He know what I was goin’ through, he know what I was trying to do, and he sent it. He sent her to me. ... She’ll be my angel till the day I die. And she’ll still be my angel when I die, ’cause she’ll be in heaven with me one day.”
By the middle of the following week, Outland’s social media post had attained viral status and was picked up by travel website View From the Wing (which is how we got wind of the story in the first place; Outland never contacted us seeking publicity). A handful of people who’d caught onto the story sent her small amounts of money that week, roughly $150 in total, and last Friday, Outland briefly met up with Ross at the Charlotte airport to give her the money as she rushed to catch a flight home to Atlanta.
After Outland disappeared around a corner of the terminal, Ross said she retreated to a quiet place in an office to weep a few more tears of joy.
Then this past Sunday, a woman Outland had never met made a payment to her Venmo account.
A $1,071 payment.
She has no idea what to do with it. All she knows is she won’t be keeping it for herself.
“I want to start something — a wave of something,” Outland says, “but I don’t know how to start it. Of people blessing random people. For their acts of kindness. So I’m gonna pay it forward. I just don’t know how I’m gonna pay it forward.”
So, maybe a voice inside her head will tell her what to do with it. Or maybe the money goes into her bag a $20 bill at a time, a piece of green paper she can whip out every time she wants to make someone feel appreciated.
Who knows?
For now, only one thing is certain: On Aug. 24, Frances Ross is scheduled for her appointment with her dentist.
In three weeks, thanks to the kindness of a stranger, she’ll have her old smile back.
This story was originally published August 5, 2021 at 12:00 PM.
