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badly enough to land her in the hospital, though (or to kill you, a small voice murmured, he might actually kill you, Rosie, and you ’ re a fool if you forget that), it would be because she had dared to steal his ATM card . . . and to use it. Did she want to risk that sort of retribution for a mere seventy-five dollars? Was that enough?
    â€œNo,” she murmured, and reached out again. This time she tapped three-five-zero-decimal-zero-zero . . . and then hesitated again. She didn’t know exactly how much of what he called “the ready” there was in the cash-and-checking account this machine tapped into, but three hundred and fifty dollars had to be a pretty sizeable chunk of it. He was going to be so angry . . .
    She moved her hand toward the CANCEL/RETRY button, and then asked herself again what difference that made. He was going to be angry in any case. There was no going back now.
    â€œAre you going to be much longer, ma’am?” a voice asked from behind her. “Because I’m over my coffee-break right now.”
    â€œOh, sorry!” she said, jumping a little. “No, I was just . . . woolgathering.” She hit the TRANSACT button. The words ONE MOMENT PLEASE appeared on the auto-teller’s VDT. The wait wasn’t long, but it was long enough for her to entertain a vivid fantasy of the machine’s suddenly emitting a high, warbling siren and a mechanized voice bellowing “ THIS WOMAN IS A THIEF! STOP HER! THIS WOMAN IS A THIEF!”
    Instead of calling her a thief, the screen flashed a thank-you, wished her a pleasant day, and produced seventeen twenties and a single ten. Rose offered the young man standing behind her a nervous, no-eye-contact smile, then hurried back to her cab.
7
    P ortside was a low, wide building with plain sandstone-colored walls. Buses of all kinds—not just Greyhounds but Trailways, American Pathfinders, Eastern Highways, and Continental Expresses—ringed the terminal with their snouts pushed deep into the loading docks. To Rosie they looked like fat chrome piglets nursing at an exceedingly ugly mother.
    She stood outside the main entrance, looking in. The terminal wasn’t as crowded as she had half-hoped (safety in numbers) and half-feared (after fourteen years of seeing almost no one but her husband and the colleagues he sometimes brought home for a meal, she had developed more than a touch of agoraphobia), probably because it was the middle of the week and shouting distance from the nearest holiday. Still she guessed there must be a couple of hundred people in there, walking aimlessly around, sitting on the old-fashioned, high-backed wooden benches, playing the video games, drinking coffee in the snackbar, or queuing for tickets. Small children hung onto their mothers’ hands, tilted their heads back, and bawled like lost calves at the faded logging mural on the ceiling. A loudspeaker that echoed like the voice of God in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic announced destinations: Erie, Pennsylvania; Nashville, Tennessee; Jackson, Mississippi; Miami, Florida (the disembodied, echoing voice pronounced it Miamuh); Denver, Colorado.
    â€œLady,” a tired voice said. “Hey, lady, little help here. Little help, what do you say?”
    She turned her head and saw a young man with a pale face and a flood of dirty black hair sitting with his back against one side of the terminal entrance. He was holding a cardboard sign in his lap. HOMELESS & HAVE AIDS , it read. PLEASE “AID” ME.
    â€œYou got some spare change, don’t you? Help me out? You’ll be ridin in your speedboat on Saranac Lake long after I’m dead and gone. Whaja say?”
    She felt suddenly strange and faint, on the edge of some mental and emotional overload. The terminal appeared to grow before her eyes until it was as large as a cathedral, and there was something horrifying about the tidal movements of the