By 2000, it was clear to Mary-Sue that Kate had no intention of ever leaving home. She knew the limited allure of Alta Vista—most young people would be raring to flee. Not her Kate. Like only Mary-Sue could, she blamed herself. Kate’s dysfunction was the direct result, she felt, of lousy parenting. Rather than expel her beloved daughter, Mary-Sue decided to withdraw more of her father’s money and, in a word, flee. Even weighing her snobbery, she settled on South Florida.

The widow of an eccentric fern collector sold Mary-Sue their estate in Homestead, just outside Miami, well below its market worth; evidently, the old woman was eager to move on. The house was built on the highest point in South Florida—a grand elevation of three feet. One couldn’t see the street from it, let alone the coast, but that was fine by Mary-Sue. The antebellum-style villa, complete with ornamental shutters, came cocooned in five wooded acres, hidden like a militiaman’s lair deep in the agricultural heartland of Dade County. She could be a hermit all over again if she so chose, pursue any life philosophy she damn well pleased. She felt the same giddy freedom she experienced when she first arrived in California in the ’60s, before Katie, before Santa Claus Lane, before she managed to botch up her one attempt in her entire life to become a normal human being.

South Florida was filled with old people—Jews, in many cases—and they read. That meant that Mary-Sue could, for culture, dip into nearby Coral Gables for its bookstores. On top of that, the local campus of the Miami-Dade community college held interesting lectures from time to time, ranging in topic from the sexual imagery in pre-Columbian pottery to the reproductive lives of microscopic plants, and through those occasions, she met new people, some of them bearable enough to be considered friends. For food, she had mango, orange, key lime, loquat and guava trees in her yard, and the Publix markets sold cheap avocados and everything else she could possibly need, aside from the company of her Katie. But distance was good for them—they both needed to grow up, independently. Yes, she reminded herself, even she, a woman in her sixties.

Kate came out to visit twice a year, speeding in from the Miami airport until she reached the big, Spanish moss-draped cypress that concealed Mary-Sue’s driveway. Why her mother chose to live in a place like this confounded her.