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“Exactly,” Matt said, and then sang, not anywhere near on key, “‘Give your heart and soul to me / And life will always be, / La vie en rose.’”
He leaned over, kissed her on the neck—then playfully squeezed her thigh.
“Life in pink,” he said. “I think I like the sound of that.”
“Mind out of the gutter, Matt! You are shameless!”
He grinned, clearly unrepentant.
Amanda went on: “It actually translates more to ‘Life through rose-colored glasses,’ you know. Don’t be such a Neanderthal.”
She was shaking her head but grinning.
He pointed at the radio.
“But look at that, getting back to my complaints about this place.”
“Look at what?”
“I mean, look at her. There’s a genuine success story. Gardot grew up here, raised in large part by her Polish grandmother while her mother traveled for work as a photographer. Their family had no money. Had to bounce from place to place. But they scraped together enough so that she could start taking music lessons when she was nine.”
The light cycled to green, but Matt had to wait while what appeared to be a homeless male slowly pushed a battered grocery cart covered in a tarp out of the crosswalk.
He continued: “By the time she was sixteen, she was playing piano in Philly clubs on the weekend. She was working hard to get ahead—and studying fashion design at Community College on Spring Garden Street—when a hit-and-run driver turned her world upside down.”
“She was riding a bicycle, if I remember,” Amanda said, nodding gently as she looked out her window.
“Which offered zero protection,” Matt picked up, “and she was left with broken bones and brain damage that made it difficult to even talk. Stuck on her back in a hospital bed for a year, she had to relearn everything. That was when?”
“Maybe ten years ago? When she was nineteen.”
“Amazing. There she was, unable to sit at a piano, not to mention play. She began by humming, then later singing, and then taught herself to play guitar. When XPN heard recordings of the new music, the station aired them. And now? Now she’s an international artist, with gold- and platinum-selling albums, even a Grammy nomination.”
Matt paused, then grunted.
“There she’d been a year in bed,” he finished, “recovering from broken bones, broken brain, broken everything. Except no broken spirit. You don’t see her standing on the sidewalk corner, needle tracks on her arms, blaming The Man for holding her down.”
—
Payne approached South Broad.
He heard his cell phone Ping! and saw the text from Daquan Williams: “I got real trouble. It’s about Pookie. Can you come talk? I’m at work. Daily Grind diner. Broad/Erie.”
Payne turned on Broad and saw City Hall ahead. He knew that when William Penn had put charcoal to paper in 1682 and mapped out what would become the City of Philadelphia, Penn had put City Hall at its exact center.
Payne looked up at the historic building—the country’s largest municipal building, larger than the U.S. Capitol—his eyes going all the way to the bronze statue of Penn standing atop its dome, keeping vigil over his city.
Wonder what ol’ Willie Penn would think of this place today? And all that’s gone on in the chambers below his bronze boots?
Bet he’d shove a bronze boot up their collective corrupt asses if given the chance . . .
Payne glanced around at traffic.
Fat chance finding an empty taxi in this weather.
And my car is at Amanda’s.
He looked back at City Hall.
