She had been praying for something like this to happen.

The call came from an office chair, from a plain back room with a wood-stained floor at a Wal-Mart in North Miami Beach.

Assistant store manager Julie Burns spoke first.

“Hi, is this Bernice Rolle?”

It was.

“I’m calling to give you some good news. We have a secret Santa that paid off your layaway bill.”

“You aren’t lying, are you?” Rolle asked, sounding surprised and bewildered all at once. “Oh my God. This is unbelievable. Oh wow.”

Burns said Rolle could come pick up her gifts, right now, free of charge.

“All day long I was hoping for something like this,” Rolle said. “God opened up the windows of heaven and poured a blessing on me.”

Rolle, who was experiencing back pain Saturday, said she would send her daughter Lavenia to collect the $70 worth of items she purchased as Christmas gifts but couldn’t afford to pay for.

In a scene that has been playing out across the country, anonymous donors are going to Kmarts and Wal-Marts to pay off layaway bills. They’re being called layaway angels.

At a Hialeah Kmart on Saturday, someone paid for more than $400 dollars in layaway gifts. At an Ocala Wal-Mart, a man bought $2,500 worth of $100 gift cards for customers, and in Winter Garden, according to a Kmart spokesperson, donations have reached $5,000. They have reached as high as $15,000 in Orange County, California.

“It is honestly being driven by people wanting to do a good deed at this time of the year,” Salima Yala, Kmart’s division vice president for layaway, told the AP.

The layaway program, a layover from a Great Depression payment system, allows customers to purchase items in incremental payments. But usage ebbed in the 1980s and ’90s as credit cards became more popular. Now, as customers in shaky financial situations or with credit card debt attempt to be more frugal, the program has been on the rise.

Wal-Mart only just brought layaway back this year, only for toys and electronics. Kmart is one of the only stores that offers the program year round.

“A layaway goes a long way,” Wal-Mart store manager Joe Moniz said, “especially in this economy.”

As a courtesy, Moniz said, his store and others south of Tampa extended the pickup layaway deadline for Christmas to Sunday — and a man named RS Schmitt saw an opportunity to do some good. He’s part of a non-profit called The South Beach Athletic Club, and on Saturday the group gave a $1,000 check to Wal-Mart to pay off the layaway bills for 18 families. They plan to help others, too.

The club even bought the domain name payofflayaway.com, and they hope to encourage people to give what they can to help families in need. They hope to turn the movement into an annual occurrence.

“Our goal is to send this around the country,” Schmitt said, “to get this to be a ripple effect.”

When Lavenia Rolle stepped up to the layaway department, she looked skeptical. She cautiously approached the counter. Schmitt stood far away but close enough to watch her reaction. She had recently canceled a layaway for her young son and wasn’t sure how she’d scramble to get the money for her mother’s gifts. She was happy.

“I’m just shocked,” she said, “shocked and surprised.”

She explained her mother was praying that money would fall out of the sky.

“Whoever did this,” she said, with an armful of gifts, “please tell them thank you from the bottom of our hearts.”