Patsy tapped the windshield with her fingernail, meaning to point to the sign that hung from the rafters just a little way ahead. “It would be cheaper,” she pointed out. “If I’m going to stay here for at least six hours, and I am, it would be cheaper to buy an all-day ticket.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” the man said.
“It is right though,” Patsy told him. “It’s a dollar fifty an hour, for six hours that’s nine dollars. But it’s only seven dollars for an all-day ticket. So you see, if I buy an all-day ticket I save—”
“Two dollars,” the man said.
“Right,” Patsy said.
The man leaned back against the far side of the booth and scratched his ear. He was really an awful man, Patsy thought, filthy and tired. He had deep streaks of black under his fingernails and smudges on his skin everywhere Patsy could see it. The hair on his arms was matted and slick. She could just imagine him sleeping between the garbage cans in the alley out back every night when his work was finished. She had no idea at all how people were chosen to do this kind of work.
He came back to her side of the booth and leaned out the little window again. “All right,” he said. “I can sell you an all-day ticket.”
“Fine,” Patsy told him.
“The thing is, you have to pay for an all-day ticket in advance. The whole seven dollars right this minute.”
“No problem at all.” Patsy unzipped the top of her thick black Coach bag and pulled out her wallet. It was a Coach wallet too. Stephen had always liked Coach. Patsy took out a five and two ones and handed them over. “Here you are,” she said.
The man took the seven dollars and put it in his gray tin lock box. Then he shuffled around among his papers for a moment while he found a stiff piece of oaktag that Patsy presumed was the all-day ticket. He stamped it with a hand stamp and gave it to her.
“There it is,” he said.
It was stamped PAID. Patsy put it in the visor over her head.
“Thank you,” she told him.
“I guess that’s how people get to be rich people like you,” the man said. “Playing all the angles.”
“Thank you,” Patsy said again.
The black-and-white-striped electric arm popped up in front of her car. Patsy got into gear and stepped on the gas and went forward. She bumped over a metal plate on the floor and felt the whole car shudder.
She had to go up to the third level before she found a parking place. People were always talking about how Philadelphia was dying, but you couldn’t prove it by the number of parking spaces available on a typical weekday afternoon. Patsy pulled in between a white Toyota Celica and a greenish-blue Saturn and got out. She locked up very carefully and went around to the back of the Volvo. The packages looked like nothing but brown wrapping paper. The clothes were hidden completely. Patsy tried the back door, found it locked too, and left it.
To get out, she had to go down an elevator in a well that let her off right next to the booth with the dirty old man in it. He didn’t notice her come through. Patsy went out onto the street and looked around. It was still hot and the people still looked tired. She walked half a block north and turned the corner. On this street there were stores and banks and newsstands. It looked a little more alive than the street with the parking garage on it had. It was still terminal, Patsy thought. Sometimes Philadelphia looked to her as if it were slowly being drained of people.
Patsy walked two more blocks and then stopped at a kiosk for a copy of the paper. It was a copy of today’s Philadelphia Inquirer, which she had already seen, but she didn’t care. She paid with a ten-dollar bill and waited patiently while the woman in the booth made change. She tucked the paper under her arm and walked away. There were more and more people on the street. She was getting closer and closer to the university.
The bank was just a block away from the administration building at Penn. Patsy could raise her head and see the start of the attenuated quads the university called a campus. She had met Stephen on one of those quads. He had been hunched up on a stone bench, studying an accounting textbook.
Patsy went into the bank and stopped at the long counter set aside for making out forms and writing checks. She took out her checkbook and wrote a check for $15,000. Then she turned around and looked at the tellers standing at their windows. The bank was relatively busy at this hour, mostly with young people who looked like students. There was a line at two of the three windows. At the third, a heavyset man in a tan linen suit, rumpled and sweaty, was trying to deposit what looked like thousands of penny rolls. Patsy got into line behind a young man with a backpack.