“Leave the cash on the table, Dave, we need to go,” I whispered, my voice tight as I watched him open his faded leather wallet.

He didn’t listen.

He just slid three twenty-dollar bills into the plastic presenter for a bill that only came to thirty dollars.

“I just feel like being generous, Clara,” he said, his voice flat.

He didn’t look at me.

He kept his eyes focused on the salt shaker, turning it slowly in his hands.

We were sitting in a vinyl booth at the Oak Diner on Cherry Street, a little place in Toledo, Ohio.

It smelled like burnt coffee and pine cleaner.

It was the third time in two weeks he had dragged me here.

I need to back up for a second because you need to understand who Dave is.

Dave is a retired machinist.

He worked thirty-four years at the Toledo Jeep assembly plant, pulling double shifts when the overtime was available.

He spent his entire life saving pennies.

He is the kind of man who washes disposable plastic forks so we can use them again.

He keeps a binder of grocery coupons in the glove box of our old Buick.

For thirty years, he kept his money folded tightly inside that faded leather wallet with the broken brass zipper.

It was a gift from his father, and the leather was rubbed completely raw at the corners.

So when he started leaving fifty percent tips everywhere we went, my stomach started to hurt.

It didn’t make any sense.

At first, it was ten dollars on a twenty-dollar lunch at the pancake house.

Then it was thirty dollars on a sixty-dollar dinner at the steakhouse.

Every single time, he would pull out that old wallet, count the bills with his thick, calloused fingers, and leave a small fortune on the table.

When I asked him about it, he just shrugged his shoulders.

“People are struggling, Clara,” he would say.

“The economy is bad. We have a little extra. It is fine.”

But we didn’t have a little extra.

We were living on a fixed retirement pension and a small social security check.

I was the one who managed the household budget, and I could see our savings starting to dip.

I knew something was wrong.

My mind kept going to the worst places.

I wondered if he was having some kind of late-life crisis.

Or maybe he was hiding a medical diagnosis.

I even thought about dementia.

But then we started coming to the Oak Diner.

And that is when I met Maya.

She was young, probably twenty-two or twenty-three, with pale blonde hair pulled back in a messy ponytail.

She had these tired, quiet blue eyes that looked like they had seen too much for her age.

She was wearing a faded green apron over a plain white t-shirt, and her silver name tag was slightly crooked.

“Hey Dave, the usual?” she asked the moment we sat down.