For the next three weeks, I practically lived at a twenty-four-hour diner situated right off the main highway. I took the grueling graveyard shifts, pouring endless cups of coffee and wiping down greasy tables to save up for a cramped basement room I had found on a community board.
Between serving tables, I frantically applied for high-interest private student loans on my phone. Without a cosigner, every single application came back with a glaring red denial notification. My lifelong dream of becoming an emergency room nurse was fading with every passing night.
The diner was a haven for the lonely, but no one was lonelier—or grumpier—than Mr. Gideon.
He was a seventy-two-year-old retired librarian who came in every single night at exactly eleven o’clock. He always ordered a simple black coffee, complained loudly that the diner’s overhead music was giving him a headache, and left exactly a fifteen percent tip, never a single penny more.
