Eighty-Six

by Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The ticket came to the window at six-forty on a Sunday evening in October, and it was in Bernadette's handwriting, not from the printer.

Steve Kallergis noticed that first. In the Olympia Diner on Route 46 in Little Falls every order had gone through the computer since 2015. The tickets came out of a little thermal printer over the grill, purple ink on paper that curled in the heat. Bernadette Ruane had been waiting tables at the Olympia for thirty-one years and had fought the computer harder than anybody, and lost, and had not handwritten a ticket since.

She didn't clip it to the rail. She held it out to him through the window, and he saw that her hand was not steady.

"Booth six," she said.

He took it. Bernadette's capitals, the ones she used for allergies and complaints.

SHORT STACK. FETA ON THE SIDE. HONEY WARM, NOT HOT. CUT IN NINE.

Steve put down his spatula. On the flat-top behind him two cheeseburgers and a Taylor ham went on cooking without him.

Nine squares. Not four, not six. Nine, three across and three down, like a tic-tac-toe board, because when Katerina was nine years old she had announced at this counter that she would have her pancakes cut in her age, and when she turned ten he had cut them in ten, which is not a shape, and she had cried, and so it stayed nine, for eight years, every Sunday.

He had put it on the menu when she was eleven. Katerina's Plate, $4.95. He had taken it off the week after his daughter's car was found by Lake Hopatcong, and for fourteen years nobody had ordered it. That was not quite right. For fourteen years nobody had been able to. There is a word for it in a diner. You eighty-six a thing when you are out of it.

"Who," Steve said.

"A girl." Bernadette's voice was low. "Steve. Go and look."

---

There were two booths along the front window that got the sunset from across the road, and booth six was the second. Kat had done her homework in it. Steve walked out past the pie case in his apron with the ticket still in his hand, and the girl in the booth looked up at him and did not look away.

She was thirteen, perhaps. She wore a grey hooded sweatshirt that said ABINGTON HEIGHTS across the chest in maroon letters. A school backpack sat beside her on the bench, and in front of her a glass of water she hadn't touched. Her hair was dark and pulled back hard. She had a small chin and very straight eyebrows, and there was a mole beside her left eye.

Kat hadn't had the mole. Steve had. He'd had it since he was a boy in Astoria, and his own mother had called it the place God kissed him, and he had been embarrassed about it his whole life.

"You ordered that," he said, and held up the ticket.

"Yes."

"Who told you to order it like that?"

"Nobody told me." She said it as if he were slow. "It's how I eat them. It's how my mom makes them."

Behind him somebody at the counter was asking for more coffee. Steve didn't hear who answered.

He sat down across from the girl. He had not sat in booth six in fourteen years either. The vinyl had been redone in 2019 and it felt wrong, too stiff, like a new pair of shoes.

"What's your name?"

"Daphne."

"Daphne what?"

She shook her head. She had been planning this, he saw, the way children plan things, step by step on the bus. There was a list, and his questions were not on it.

"I have to ask you something first," she said. "And you have to tell me the truth, because I'll know."

"All right."

Daphne put both her hands flat on the table.

"Did you hit her?"

---

Here is what Steve Kallergis had told the Passaic County detective in October 2012, and the State Police, and the reporter from The Record, and the priest, and his brother, and the people from the church who came with food for three weeks:

That Katerina had had dinner with her parents at the diner that Sunday as always. That she had been quiet, but she was seventeen. That she had left in her own car at about nine-thirty, a 2004 Honda Civic, silver, to go to a friend's to study, and that she never got there. That he had gone home at ten-fifteen after closing and had sat up waiting, and at one in the morning had begun driving around looking for her. That he had no idea, none, why she would drive thirty miles west in the dark to a lake she had been to twice in her life.

It was true that he had driven around looking for her. He had driven until five in the morning, Route 23, Route 46, Route 80, the parking lots of every diner between here and Netcong, because he knew the way a child of a diner thinks, and in the end she would want coffee.

The rest was not true.

She had told him at the counter at nine o'clock, after the last customer left. Bernadette was out the back with a cigarette and Eleni was doing the register. Kat had stood very straight with her hands at her sides, like a girl reciting in school, and told him she was pregnant. That she was keeping it. That she wasn't going to tell him who the father was, because he would do something.

He had done something. He had hit her across the face with his open hand, once, in front of the pie case, hard enough that she put her hip into the counter.

In nineteen years of marriage he had never raised a hand to anyone. Not to Eleni. Not to a drunk at three in the morning. He had been a big man all his life and had been taught that big men put their hands in their pockets. And he had hit his daughter, and she had looked at him without crying, and picked up her keys, and walked out of the front door, and he heard the Civic start. And Eleni had said nothing, nothing at all, had gone on counting the drawer with a rubber band round her wrist, and Steve had gone out of the front door after his daughter.

Forty hours later a state park worker found the Civic on the shoulder of Lakeside Boulevard by Hopatcong State Park with the doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition. Kat's jacket was on the rocks at the water's edge. The State Police divers searched for three weeks, until the water was too cold, and in the spring they searched again.

Steve had stood on the shore in Landing every day of those three weeks, with Eleni beside him in her black wool coat, and every day he had thought: I did this. Not the lake. Me. With my hand.

He never told the police about the slap. He had always believed that if he said it out loud, it would become the story, and he would be the man who drove his daughter into the water. He'd preferred to be a man nobody could understand.

There was one detail about the car that he never understood either. The radio had been on when the trooper found it, on low, with the battery nearly gone. It was tuned to the AM station out of Paterson that played Greek music on Sunday nights, the bouzouki and the old women singing about ships. It was the station Eleni kept on in the kitchen at home. Kat had hated it all her life. She called it the funeral channel.

Steve had decided, standing on the rocks, that in the end his daughter had wanted her mother. That at the end she had turned the dial looking for home. He had held on to that for fourteen years. It was the only kind thing he had.

---

"Once," Steve said to the girl in booth six. "I hit her once."

Daphne looked at him for a long time with her straight eyebrows.

"She said once too," she said.

Steve heard the word she had used. Said. Not wrote, not told someone, years ago. Said, the way you say a thing over dinner. The way people talk about someone who is alive.

"Where is she?" he said. His voice came out wrong. A man at the counter turned round to look. "Daphne. Where is she?"

"She doesn't know I'm here."

"Where?"

"Pennsylvania." She was holding the edge of the table now. "Near Scranton. I took the Martz bus from the Lackawanna station to New York at seven this morning and then I got another bus back out. It took basically all day. I told her I was at Mackenzie's."

Scranton. Two hours. Two hours up Route 80, past the lake, past the Water Gap. All this time.

"Is she all right? Is she sick?" He heard himself. "Why now? Why did you come now?"

Daphne's chin went up. "Because I'm thirteen, and nobody would ever tell me anything about you except that you hit her and you have a diner, and I wanted to see if you were a monster." She took a breath. "And because Yiayia said you'd be here till ten, because you're always here on Sundays, because you don't go home anymore."

The diner went on around them. The milkshake machine. The register drawer. The two cheeseburgers on the flat-top, which were going to be hockey pucks, and somebody would have to throw them out.

"Yiayia," Steve said.

Daphne's face changed. She had not known it was a secret. He watched her understand that it had been one, and that she had just given it away.

Yiayia. Grandmother.

His own mother had been dead since 2003. Eleni's mother had died in Greece before Kat was born.

Eleni, his wife, went to see her sister Fotini in Astoria on the second Sunday of every month. She had done it for, what, eleven, twelve years. She took the car on Sunday morning and came back on Monday afternoon with a white box of koulourakia tied with string, and Steve ate them with his coffee all week and never once called Fotini to say thank you, because he and Fotini had not spoken since the funeral that was not a funeral, the memorial at St. Nicholas, when she'd said something about Kat that he didn't forgive.

Today was the third Sunday of October. Eleni had gone yesterday, on the Saturday. She'd said Fotini's hip was bad, and she needed to go an extra time.

"Where is my wife," Steve said, very quietly.

Daphne was looking down at her water now.

"She was at our house," she said. "This morning. She was asleep on the couch when I left. She always sleeps on the couch."

---

He left the girl with Bernadette. He told her to give the girl whatever she wanted, and to call no one, and Bernadette nodded, and he went out through the kitchen and the back door into the lot, where the dumpsters were and the milk crates. It was full dark and cold, forty-five degrees. He could hear the traffic on 46.

He stood exactly where Bernadette stood for her cigarettes and tried to call his wife. It went to voicemail. Her voice, in English, then in Greek. He didn't leave a message. He couldn't think of one.

The back door opened behind him. Bernadette came out with her coat over her uniform and a pack of Newports in her hand, and lit one, and offered him the pack, and he shook his head, though he hadn't smoked since 1991 and wanted one very badly.

"She's eating," Bernadette said. "I cut them in nine."

"You knew," Steve said.

Bernadette looked at the end of her cigarette.

"Steve."

"You saw her face when she walked in. You've been here thirty-one years and you've seen that face four thousand times. And you didn't put that order in the computer, you wrote it out, so I'd know your writing and I'd know you weren't kidding." He was not shouting. He found that he didn't have the breath for it. "How long have you known?"

"I didn't know she was alive," Bernadette said. "I swear to God, Stavros. Not till that kid walked in tonight. I swear on my mother."

"But you knew something."

She smoked for a while. A truck went by on 46 and its lights swept the back of the lot and the dumpsters and her face.

"That night," she said. "After. You went out the front, you remember? You went out the front and you drove off to find her. I was back here. Right here, by the crates." She pointed with the cigarette at the far corner of the lot, by the fence, where Kat had always parked so the Civic wouldn't get dinged. "Her car was still there. You thought she drove off. She didn't drive off, Steve. She sat there in it, in the dark, with the engine running. Crying, I guess. I didn't go over. I thought, leave her be. And then after a while Eleni came out the side door with her coat on, and her pocketbook, and she went over and she got in the driver's side. And Kat moved over. And Eleni drove the car out of the lot."

Steve said nothing.

"There was a pickup," Bernadette said. "Waiting out on the road, on the shoulder, by the Sunoco. Lights off. When the Civic went out, the pickup went after it."

"You told the police she left alone."

"I told the police I was inside the whole time." Bernadette dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. "Eleni came in Monday morning. I hadn't slept. She came and sat at the counter like a customer and I gave her a coffee, and she said, 'Bernie, you were inside the whole time.' Just like that. Not a question. And I thought about what to say, and then I thought about Kat's face." She looked at him for the first time. "There was a mark on it. On her cheek. I saw it under the light when Eleni opened the car door. The shape of a hand."

---

He understood it then. It came to him all at once, the way a ticket comes out of the printer, the whole order at once and no arguing with it.

Eleni had driven the Civic thirty miles west in the dark, with the pickup following. She had left it on Lakeside Boulevard with the keys in it and the doors unlocked, and put her daughter's jacket on the rocks. Then she had got into the pickup with Kat and the boy, whoever he was, and they had driven her home, and she had been sitting in the kitchen in her robe when Steve came in at five in the morning. She was white in the face, and she said, Nothing? Nothing?, and held on to him.

And the radio.

Kat hadn't turned the dial at the end, looking for her mother. Kat hadn't been in the driver's seat. Her mother had driven thirty miles with her own station on, the funeral channel, low, because it was what she always did in a car, and had forgotten to change it back. It was the one mistake in the whole thing, and for fourteen years Steve had held it like a holy picture.

Then she had stood beside him on the rocks for three weeks in her black wool coat, while men in dry suits went down into the cold water for a body she knew wasn't there.

Because if a girl runs away, her father goes looking for her. Steve would have looked forever. He'd have hired people. He would have stood outside every shelter and every boy's house in Passaic County. But if a girl drowns, her father stands on a shore, and after a while, if he is lucky, he stops.

He had never stopped. He had only stopped going home.

"Steve," Bernadette said. "What are you going to do?"

He didn't answer. He went back inside.

---

Daphne was in booth six with the plate in front of her. Seven of the nine squares were gone. She ate the way Kat had eaten them, one square at a time with a fork in her left hand, dipped in the honey, then a corner of feta, then the next one. The two missing squares were in a row across the bottom. Kat had always eaten the bottom row first. She said it was the foundation.

Steve sat down across from his granddaughter. He couldn't think of a single thing to say to her that would not frighten her, so he didn't say anything. He took a paper napkin out of the dispenser and folded it, and folded it again, and Daphne watched his hands.

"You're not a monster," she said finally, with her mouth full, as if she were reporting to somebody. "You're just kind of big."

"My mother used to say that."

"Mom says it." She swallowed. "She says you used to carry her on your shoulders into the walk-in fridge in summer, because it was the only cold place in Little Falls."

He had forgotten that. He had not forgotten it. He had put it somewhere and not gone there.

The phone in the front pocket of the backpack began to buzz.

Daphne looked at it and went pale in a way that made her look about seven years old. She took it out and held it so he could see the screen. One word, and a little picture of a woman squinting in the sun with her hair blowing across her face. He couldn't see the face properly. He could see the hair.

MOM.

"She knows," Daphne whispered. "Mackenzie's mom must have called."

It buzzed in her hand. Three times. Four.

Steve thought about what he would say. He thought about it the way he had thought about it on the rocks at Landing, and in the parking lots of every diner between here and Netcong, and at five every morning for fourteen years when the flat-top was heating and the place was empty. He had had fourteen years to work out the first sentence. He didn't have it.

Daphne held the phone out across the table to him. She didn't answer it first. She just held it out, with the plate of pancakes between them, two squares left, the honey going cold.

He took it. He pressed the green button with his thumb, which was too big for the screen, and it took him two tries.

He didn't say anything. He listened.

There was traffic. A car on a highway, fast. The tick of a turn signal. Then a woman's voice, older than he remembered, lower, out of breath with fear, a voice he would have known in the dark and at the bottom of a lake.

"Daph? Daphne, baby, where are you? Yiayia's driving, we're on Eighty, just tell me where you are."

Steve looked out of the window of booth six at the lights on Route 46, going west.

"Katerina," he said. "You're coming to the diner."

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem ūndecimum Kalendās Novembrēs (22 October 2026), ab Alanō Ginsberg-Cobden per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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