“I’d have thought you came from Long Island.”

“Well, I’ve lived there too.”

“What about your childhood? Where’d you grow up?”

“Just about everywhere, it seems.” She sighed. “It was so long ago it seems like a dream.”

This was getting nowhere. “Where haven’t you lived?”

“On the moon.” She smiled at him. “So what’s with all the questions?”

“Just curious. You seem to know a lot about me and my father, and you two seem close, so don’t you think it’s natural for me to want to know a little about you?”

“Not to worry. We’re not involved. We never will be. We’re just friends. Isn’t that enough?”

“I suppose it is,” Jack said.

He supposed it would have to be.

He took Pemberton Road southwest with Anya following on the map and acting as navigator. Oyv lay stretched out in the sun on the deck under the rear window. A drainage ditch paralleled the road, sometimes on the left, other times on the right. Probably served as a canal of some sort in normal times, but now it was mostly a succession of intermittent pools of stagnant water.

“They’re called borrow pits,” Anya said, as if reading his mind. “They’re where the dirt and limestone came from when they were building up these roads. This time of year they should be filled with water, with turtles and little alligators and jumping fish. Now…”

He could see what filled them now: beer cans, Snapple bottles, old tires, and hunks of algae-encrusted Styrofoam.

Coarse brown grass stretched away to either side. He spotted three white-tailed deer—a doe and two fawns—grazing near a stand of trees. As the car approached they leaped over a bush and disappeared.

He saw a sign that read PANTHER CROSSING.

“Panthers?”

Anya nodded. “They still have some around here.”

The idea of wild panthers about was a little unsettling even when in a car. Imagine seeing that sign while on foot.

“I’ve driven through here with your father a couple of times. Every time we pass that sign he says some rhyme about a ‘panther’ and ‘anther.’”

Jack had to laugh. “Ogden Nash!”

“Who?”

“He was a very clever, down-to-earth poet. No airs about his stuff. Wrote a lot for kids. Dad loved him.”

Jack remembered his father’s nightly ritual of doling out a few of Nash’s animal poems at bedtime.

He’d forgotten about those times. He made a mental note to check the bookstores when he got home and see what was still in print. Vicky would love Nash’s wordplay.

He was jarred back to the present as they passed a burnt-out area where some asshole probably had flicked a cigarette out the window. Up ahead, a sign displaying a goofy-looking alligator informed them that this was a “South Florida Water Management District.”