As soon as they passed the crash, the road speeded up again.

For a while the view along US 1 threatened to devolve into Anytown, USA—at least an Anytown warm enough for palm trees—with a parade of Denny’s and Wendy’s and McDonalds, and Blockbusters and Chevrons and Texacos. Further proof of the depressing homogenization of America, its terror of the untried, its angst of the unique.

But then he started noticing taquerias and tapas joints, and billboards in Spanish. The Cubano and Mexican influence. He passed a place offering “fishes.” Okay, this wasn’t Anytown. This had a flavor all its own.

The colors of the buildings struck him between the eyes. Standard granite gray had been banished. The palette here was way heavy on the pastels, especially turquoise and coral. The buildings looked like molded sherbet—orange, raspberry, key lime, lemon, watermelon, casaba, and maybe a few as yet untried flavors. He spotted a mall done up in what might be called rotten-lemon-rind yellow.

Further south he passed one car dealership after another, every make from every nation that exported cars, all interspersed with AutoZones and Midas Mufflers, Goodyear Tire Centers, and dozens of no-name auto parts shops. People must be nuts about cars down here.

He realized he was hungry. He saw a place called Joanie’s Blue Crab Café and pulled off the road. The place was pretty much empty—this was off-season, after all—and decorated with local crafts. Paintings by local artists studded the wall. The other three patrons were glued to the TV where the Weather Channel was showing green, yellow, and orange swirls that were supposed to be tropical storm Elvis. They were asking when the hell they were going to get rain.

An air conditioner or two might have expanded the comfort zone in Joanie’s, but that would have detracted from the funky Florida ambiance. Jack hung in there under the twirling ceiling fans and asked the waitress for a local brew. She brought him something called Ybor Gold and it tasted so damn good he had another along with a crabcake sandwich that was out of this world. This lady could open on the Upper East Side and clean up.

Belly full, Jack stepped outside. Elvis might be dumping tons of water on Jacksonville and the rest of north Florida, but down here, though the sky was speckled with clouds, none of them looked like the raining kind. The forecast was bone dry. Dry at least as far as precipitation went, but the air itself lay thick with humidity and clung to his skin like a sloppy wet kiss from a least-favorite aunt.

Back in the car he searched around the radio dial for some music— rock, preferably—but all he found was country or folks speaking Spanish or sweaty-voiced preachers shouting aboutJay-sus .

If you want to believe inJay-sus , he thought, fine. If you want me to believe inJay-sus , fine too; you can want anything you wish. But do you have to shout?

He finally found a rock station but it was playing Lou Reed. He quick-hitSCAN . Through the years Jack had come to the conclusion that Lou Reed was a brilliant performance artist whose act was a lifelong portrayal of a singer-songwriter who couldn’t carry a tune or write a melody.

The tuner stopped on a dance station. Jack didn’t dance, the beat was monotonous, and he’d arrived in the middle of a woman doing a double-time version of “Boys of Summer.” He bailed when a cheesy organ attempted to duplicate Kootch Kortchmar’s riffs from the original. What had Don Henley ever done to deserve that?

Next stop, one of the country stations—“Gator Country One-Oh-One Point Nine!” He liked some country, mostly the Hank Williams—Senior, preferably—Buck Owens, Mel Tillis brand of mournful nobody-loves-me-but-my-dog-and-he’s-got-fleas-so-pass-that-whiskey-bottle-over-here-if-you-please ballad. He lasted maybe fifteen minutes on 101.9. Three songs, three singers, and they all sounded exactly the same. Was that the awful truth about modern country music? The one they’d kill to keep? One lead singer performing under a gazillion different names? Jack wasn’t sure about that part, but he had no doubt that the same guy had been singing backup harmony on all three songs.

Okay. Can the radio.

He saw a sign for Novaton and hung a right off US 1 onto a road that ran due west, straight as a latitude line. Looked like someone had given a guy a compass and a paver filled with asphalt and said, “Go west, young man! Go west!” It made sense. No hills or valleys to skirt. The only rises in the road he’d seen since leaving the airport had been overpasses.

He checked out the sickly palms and pines flanking the road. He’d worked with a landscaper as a teen and knew northeast greenery, but even healthy these trees would be a mystery to him. Dead gray fronds lay on the shoulder like roadkill while some skittered onto the pavement when the breeze caught them.

All the houses along the road were squat little ranches in overgrown yards, with carports instead of garages; they hunkered against the earth as if hiding from something. Every once in a while a warehouse would soar to one-and-a-half stories, but that was an aberration. The favored exterior shade seemed to be a sick green like oxidized copper, and here and there a pizza-size DTV dish would poke up from a roof. He’d been expecting lots of red-tile roofs but they seemed a rarity; most were standard asbestos shingles, pretty threadbare in many cases. Oddly, the shabbiest houses seemed to sport the most magnificent palms in their front yards.

Even if he didn’t know much about tropical or subtropical trees, he did know banyans; their distinctive aerial roots gave them away. The road to Novaton was loaded with them. In some stretches banyan phalanxes lined each side of the street and interwove their branches above the pavement, transforming a bumpy secondary road into a wondrous, leafy green tunnel.

He recognized a couple of coconut palms, only because of the yellowing nuts hanging among the fronds. Plants that in New York grew only indoors in carefully watered and fertilized pots flourished like weeds down here.

He passed a tall white water tower emblazoned with the town name and shaped like one of those old WWI potato-masher hand grenades the Germans used to toss at the Allies. At its base lay a dusty soccer field flanked by a high school, a middle school, and a senior center.

He passed a feed store. Feed what? He hadn’t seen any cattle.

Abruptly he was in Novaton and quickly found the center of town—the whole four square blocks of it. The directions from the hospital told him how to find it from there. Two right turns off Main Street and he came to a three-story cantaloupe-colored brick building of reasonable vintage. The sign out front told him he’d reached his destination.

NOVATON COMMUNITY HOSPITAL

A MEMBER OF DADE COUNTY MEDICAL SYSTEMS

He parked in a corner of the visitor lot next to some sad looking cacti and headed through the stifling late-afternoon heat toward the front door. An arthritic old man in the information kiosk gave him his father’s room number on the third floor.

Minutes later Jack was standing outside room 375. The door stood open. He could see the foot of the bed, the twin tents of the patient’s feet under the sheet. The rest was obscured by a privacy curtain. He sensed no movement in the room, no one there besides the patient.

The patient…his father…Dad.

Jack hesitated, advancing one foot across the threshold, then drawing it back.

What am I afraid of?

He knew. He’d been putting this off—not only his arrival, but thinking about this moment as well—since he’d started the trip. He didn’t want to see his father, his only surviving parent, laid out like a corpse. Alive sure, but only in the bodily sense. The man inside, the sharp-though-nerdy-middle-class mind, the lover of gin, sticky-sweet desserts, bad puns, and ugly Hawaiian shirts, was unavailable, walled off, on hold, maybe forever. He didn’t want to see him like that.