No one notices the driver and the hitchhiker as they claim their spot, and the comradely wolfing of food –mostly pancakes soggy with syrup and equally wet eggs- continues undisturbed on both sides. A portly and unsmiling waitress pushes two separate pages towards them. The driver continues walking past the stools.

“Gemme a pie an a coffee, will ya? I gotta make a phone call.”

The hitchhiker sniffs a quasi-affirmative response, but the driver is already picking up the receiver adorning a wood paneled wall at the rear.

The driver puts a finger to the black rotary when he realizes he can’t remember the full number. He should. With the exception of the past year, he’s been calling there ever since the Warshanskys got their phone put in. He remembers that night, though, and how excited little Paula was. She made him call as soon as he had driven to the first payphone, on Marlyborne Road. He had the first two letters and following four digits written out in Paula’s girlish curlicue cursive. How could he have forgotten? She wanted to talk all the time, as soon as he got off work. So he’d pull it out of a pocket and there it would be, between his blackened fingers: that crinkled, yellowing piece of paper. Except by that point, he held onto it more as a memento. He had long memorized the number, but wouldn’t dare throw it away.

Now here he stands, however many years later, in front of another payphone with a completely different type of urgency coursing through his dialing finger. For a moment, he thinks it’s possible he may still have the paper. After all, he never threw it out, as far as he can recall. The driver even reaches for his wallet before he remembers how he had dumped out its contents onto the bed and never bothered to pick them back up.

How long ago all that seems. The memory is recounted with such an underwater, dream-like quality. He was in shock. The driver can’t begin to imagine what else he might have done in those crazed hours after the discovery yesterday morning.

Then it comes to him. The first two letters: WP for Woodland Park, the Warshanky’s neighborhood in Dearborn. His finger merely fills in the rest, without the actual numbers ever consciously coming to mind. It’s as if his finger remembers exactly how far on the dial to go with each spin. It rings, and keeps ringing. The driver is sure it is a wrong number when he hears the click, and the wary answer of an aging, though familiar, voice.