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.

Yeah, well that’s just too damn bad for me, isn’t it, he thought as he stepped into the room and marched to the foot of the bed. And stared.

Jeez, what happened to him? Did he shrink?

He’d expected bruises and they were there in abundance: a bandage on the left side of his head, a purple goose egg on his forehead, and a pair of black eyes. What shocked him was how small his father looked in that bed. He’d never been a big man, maintaining a lean and rangy build even through middle age, but now he looked so flat and frail, like a miniature, two-dimensional caricature tucked into a bed-shaped envelope.

Besides the IV bag hanging over the bed, running into him, another bag hung below the mattress, catching the urine coming out of him. Spikes marched in an even progression along the glowing line on the cardiac monitor.