Metro

Toll collector and commuter married after meeting on Thruway

ROAD TO HAPPINESS: Michael Fazio picked up more than just the fee as a toll collector on the New York Thruway booth in Kingston after talking to Sonya Baker on her trips into Manhattan.

ROAD TO HAPPINESS: Michael Fazio picked up more than just the fee as a toll collector on the New York Thruway booth in Kingston after talking to Sonya Baker on her trips into Manhattan. (Stephen Lance Denne)

You won’t find love in the E-ZPass lane.

Just ask Sonya Baker, who met the man of her dreams — New York State Thruway toll collector Michael Fazio — at a tollbooth at Exit 19.

The drive-through romance began in 1993, when Baker, an opera singer living in Woodstock, would motor up and down the highway once a week to and from Manhattan auditions.

Along the way, she noticed a friendly toll collector at Exit 19 in Kingston with striking hazel eyes who was “desperately cute.”

The toll collector noticed the motorist, too. “It was the smile that caught me,” Fazio told The Post.

Small talk ensued for three months — each chat lasting only a few seconds, as traffic backed up behind them.

“How’s your day? Where are you going? What are you up to today?”

But inwardly, their motors revved.

Fazio began to keep vigil for her white Toyota Corolla. But six months went by without further contact. One afternoon, Fazio looked up from counting cash and saw Baker.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“I’ve been here. Where have you been?”

“You must have been coming through the wrong lane,” he replied.

“Who’s to know what the right lane is, buddy?” she said.

Fazio had a stroke of brilliance: He would put an orange cone out in front of his lane to let her know which of the four cash booths was his for the day.

“It’ll be like keeping a candle in the window for you,” he told her.

Smitten, Baker began thinking up reasons to use the Thruway. She would swerve to his booth, sometimes across several lanes of traffic, when she spotted the cone.

They learned more about each other during quick conversations leaning out their windows.

She loved Puccini and Verdi, and he was a devoted Yankee fan.

She never had to think of conversation starters because the repartee was “so easy between us,” Baker said.

Fazio began paying her 35-cent toll because “I knew she was a struggling singer.”

Three months later, Baker finally got up the nerve to ask the “cute toll collector” out. Her hands shook as she slipped him a note with her phone number.

Fazio took Baker to dinner and a movie. Other dates followed. He took her to her first baseball game at Yankee Stadium; she took him to his first opera, “La Boheme” at the Met.

The couple — who recall their unusual courtship in a newly published collection, “All There Is: Love Stories From the Story Corps” — have been married now for 12 years.

Ten years ago, they moved to Kentucky, where she works as a voice and music professor and is dean of students at Murray State College. Fazio runs the activity center at a nursing home.

They think back fondly on that tollbooth.

“It shows you that as long as you are open, you can find people in all sorts of places,” Baker said.