“I told him where it was.” Her voice has grown deeper, sexier and as she’s aged, I guess, past sex. “You heard me, honey. I said, ‘Dick, it’s in B-2.’ Because I remembered that by—‘To Be or Not to Be.’”

“Isn’t a liberal education a wonderful leg-up?” (Hartley here is really working to be pleasant.) I flew South to relax. I have lived in Manhattan so long I’m good for nothing but. There, if you have cash, and if you don’t look like a Harlem fare, you can just lift your hand and make a cab appear any hour, day or night. Here you get assigned a single car. And you can lose the thing, apparently.

As a favor to my parents, I usually arrive wearing a jacket and tie, to set myself apart from the airport’s rude Hawaiian shirts. Not today. By now, this far into rounds as a friend-nurse, my new motto runs: Why not look as tired as you feel?

It comforts your patients, if not your parents. Isn’t it dishonest, appearing too natty, in control? These dark rings under my eyes are now countable as those within some redwood’s trunk—and like the tree, I’m not unproud of them.

My folks failed to meet me at the gate, first time ever. They forgot to tell me in advance. I fretted till, outside Baggage Claim, I spied their gleaming silver car. It rested in a Handicapped Zone. Had they fudged? Embracing Mom, I spotted, on their interior mirror, the Blue Permit hanging, a little white stick figure in its little white stick wheelchair.

They smiled so. Even Dad. He tried imbuing one firm handshake with a hug’s velocity. I, overbold from swashbuckling hospital emotions, moved to embrace him. He waddled backward, nearly fell against the car. In his cool blue eyes, I saw a man who’d just escaped a sexual assault.

Muzak now offers us carols; I’ve lost sight of him. Dad drove us direct to this mall. Dad said I had to see the new Bloomingdale’s that, he swore, “is way better than your one up in New York.”

“Aha,” said the backseat diplomat.

Soon it’ll be Christmas. I do hope we find the Buick first.

I’d planned this trip as an escape from disability. —Working with a disease so wicked gives you a false sense that everything not It is easy.

They are shrinking, my parents. Odd but my own love for them seems to roar suddenly open—the mouth of the MGM lion—just as they go whittling kittenish into air. The more I see Robert turn ancient so damn fast, the more I long to keep these veterans here in health.

They still look luxuriously pink and silver.

Poor Dad—way out there—hoists his remote device. To reassure us?

These days, Mom risks more. Only to save face for him, of course. But how competent, dry, and witty this woman has suddenly finally become—she who agreed, at age nineteen, to use the leading lady’s energy in a supporting role.