Dave is about my age, early forties. I like to think that with his face and bleached-out hair he looks older than I do, but I’m dark with a rapidly receding hairline that makes me look every minute of my age.

My name is Lew Fonesca. I live in Sarasota, Florida, where I drove a little over three years ago when my wife was killed in a hit-and-run “accident.” “Accident” is in quotes because the police couldn’t find out who the driver was. My wife was a lawyer in the Cook County State Attorney’s office, where I worked as the head of legal research. She had prosecuted a lot of people, made a lot of them and their relatives angry. Maybe it wasn’t an accident, a drunken driver, a panicked kid who had just gotten his or her license, someone on a cell phone not paying attention.

When the funeral was over and I had nothing left to weep, I got in my 1989 Toyota in the cemetery parking lot and started to drive. I headed south, in the general direction of oblivion and the tip of Florida. I had no idea of what I would do when I got there. I wasn’t sure where “there” was. In those four days, I listened to the voices of conservative talk-show hosts, Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, Michael Savage, and the advocates of the unknown like Art Bell and Whitley Streiber, anybody who was talking. I didn’t want music. I wanted company, a voice, anyone speaking whom I didn’t have to answer. I listened but I heard nothing.

My car had given out in the DQ parking lot in Sarasota. There was an “Office For Rent” sign on the office building. I sold the car for twenty-five dollars to a couple of kids eating hot dogs and drinking Blizzards and made the first month’s rent on the office overlooking the DQ parking lot and heavily traveled Route 301, which was named Washington Street for the stretch through Sarasota.

Now I sat at the white, chipped enamel table with the sun umbrella with Dave talking about the sun and pretty women joggers. Dave was drinking water. I was working on a cheeseburger and a chocolate-cherry Blizzard, my copy of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune folded on the table in front of me.