“What about yourself? You’re wearing shorts.”

“Oh, no, they don’t want my blood. My blood’s poison to them. Ever since I started my chemo, but even after I stopped.”

She didn’t probe. They came finally to Larry’s driveway. He had a modest ranch house surrounded by palms and ferns so well pruned they looked artificial. His wagon was a white Ford panel van, the kind pop culture tied to child molesters.

As Larry’s vehicle tooled through the rural grids, he told her he’d been picking up Mary-Sue’s mail and Miami Heralds every day, and making sure that the green things around her house didn’t overgrow and “make the place look like Andrew hit it.” He was referring, of course, in his parochial way, to the hurricane of ’92 that still showed its traces in the area. Kate thought he was fishing for gratitude, and so she thanked him. Then, just as they locked their doors and sped through a less prosperous neighborhood, he told her how impressed he was by the way Mary-Sue had driven into “the colored parts” to take the elderly to the polls during the last election, and even bought them lunch without making a fuss about it. It was the first time that Kate had heard about this, and she was surprised by her mother’s sense of civic duty.

“I respected her for doing that though my politics and hers don’t mesh. At all. It was like what they say—never the twain? But we’re gettin’ there, we’re gettin’ there.” Larry smiled ruefully. “I reckon most folks are good people, no matter who or what they are. They just want what’s best for them and their families. And if it makes me a darn liberal for saying that, then so be it. Sticks and stones.” He glanced at Kate’s belly for a second. “Tell me if you need to throw up. I’ll pull over.”

Kate watched the broccoli-shaped silhouettes of fruit trees melt into the black velvet nightscape. She hadn’t seen a single light in miles. They merged onto placid Dixie highway, flanked on both sides by curved-neck orange street lamps that evoked a fuzzy tropical melancholy. They passed big box stores, pet hospitals, jet ski wholesalers, and key lime pie bakeries with windows long boarded shut—murdered in their sleep perhaps by the Pillsbury Doughboy. So many stores but not one bookshop or library. This was the land of people who couldn’t tell you what a dust jacket was. Yet, this was her mother’s land now.