He did look just like my father. The way my father looked thirteen years ago, anyway. The man didn’t look a day older. In fact, it was even kind of a good hair day for that man, and my dad always looked a bit younger when his hair was on the greasy side — a little darker — and that was how this man was looking, with his now mostly emptied wax cup of fountain Coke. He was seated at a corner table. He half-smiled at me. Maybe I was staring.

He didn’t say my name, or call me beloved, or pumpkin, or ask me how I was doing, or say it’s been a long time, hasn’t it? He just said to me, lightly, “You should sit here.” I don’t know, maybe I looked cute, in that brash yellow sweater.

So I sat. Some spilled yogurt sauce on our table glistened as if reflecting the peaks of the sunken city of Atlantis; stray salt crystals caught the fluorescent light of the place and reflected it back at angles both bacchanalian and kind of like the spinning of a child’s mobile. Or at least that was my mood. My father pawed some napkins, wiped his forehead with them; onions always made him sweat.

Say something! I admonished myself.

I asked him if he lived nearby.

“Sort of,” he said. Then, “Not really.” Then “Not originally.” Then he left. Those bells on the doorknob rang as he exited.

Had I slipped through a wormhole of time? An ad poster on the wall showed a blonde woman with ’80s bangs leaning in to take a bite of gyro while a caption offered pronunciation guidance. But it was hard to feel the faded poster could be taken as evidence; all the gyro places I’ve ever known have seemed outdated.

That night, Eddy paced his apartment. A creaking that increased in pitch, then decreased. Increased, then decreased, like the breathing of an enormous man. He was wondering, I decided, what he should give to me.

The next day, without planning to, I met my father again, at the gyro place. When I walked in, that chain of bells jingled so beautifully. Much more beautifully than the day before. I thought of the underwater warbling of sirens. “It’s nice to see you again,” my dad called out across the narrow restaurant.

I ordered a beer with my lunch, which I never do. I got a Coke, too.