I am with P., in a large city. Warm, sunny. We are wandering around,
looking at the sights. Dark comes and we still are playing yokels. We talk a lot with our eyes and mouths, not with
words.
We walk into a large parking garage whose levels descend far below
street level. The car we came in is four or five levels down. I vaguely remember
pulling in to park some hours (or days?) before. There is a man in the ticket
booth as we enter at street level; he is white, in his 50s, balding, dark hair,
glasses, thick bodied. [I describe because he looks familiar
somehow.]
For some reason P. and I have different parking tickets.
Strange since I previously thought we rode here together. She hands the ticket
man her ticket and they exchange a few words, smiling at each other. Just as she
is about to step away so I can pay, she leans back and pushes two more dollars
into the booth.
I scrounge in my pockets to pay, realizing that I don’t
have enough money to pay the ticket as I, too, joke with the ticket man. P. is
already walking downstairs, and the ticket man says something like, ‘you’re
already paid for; all I need from you is [???] cents,’ which I hand to him. I
catch up to P. as she reaches the fourth level...