y father has lost our car. He’s way out there, wandering the mall’s vast lot. He disappears behind a hundred palm trees lit with Christmas stars somehow sickening at noon. Mom and I strain to see him. There, white-haired between vehicles, his golf togs overbright as educational playthings, a thin man keeps waving something side to side.

A compass? Some pocket dowsing rod? No, she explains, it’s that thing, his latest toy (four hundred bucks)—“a no-key remote-entry device” meant to unlock the trunk, flash headlights, activate the alarm of a much-missed Buick Park Avenue. Among the thousands of cars beaded colorful to the horizon, my old man is trying to flush out his. He hopes to force his own to dance.

I am, of course, in Florida. I’ve left Angie and the others in charge of Robert’s latest hospital stay. Beside me, on this backless bench set just within mall glass, my gaunt chic mother, 80, clucks, shuddering. Feeling responsible, she acts as ashamed for herself as for poor Pop out there.

“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.