The waitress sat across from me during her break and told me that fifteen years earlier, she had been a teenage single mother working nights at that same diner. One evening, after a disastrous shift, a group of customers complained about her service and left nothing. She had gone into the back room crying because she was behind on rent and worried she wouldn’t have enough money for groceries. My father had apparently noticed. Before leaving, he placed $200 beneath his coffee cup and wrote on the receipt, “Bad nights don’t make you a bad person. Keep going.”
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