SILVER ALERT

Two unlikely traveling companions unite for a life-affirming joyride.

When wealthy septuagenarian businessman Herbert Atlas takes Susan Summerville, an elegant Palm Beach art gallery owner 13 years his junior, as his third wife, he never dreams he’ll end up as her caregiver in their elegant Key West home after she sinks into the impenetrable fog of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Now 83, with his body ravaged by advanced prostate cancer and an array of other ailments, the irascible Herb pushes back against his children’s plan to move him and Susan to a continuing care facility to live out their final days. Herb’s ally in his fight to cling to the shards that remain of his broken former life is Renee Martin, a young aesthetician hired to care for Susan’s nails, who becomes an inadvertent art therapist for her client. But Renee, whose real name is Deirdre June “Dee Dee” Mullins and who has migrated to Florida from the mountains of North Carolina, has a dark past she’s trying, with only intermittent success, to fend off in the present. She thinks she’s done that when she meets Willie, an aspiring poet who lives in a ramshackle old house, but he’s battling his own demons that complicate their romantic relationship. Shifting between third-person narration and Dee Dee’s affecting voice, Smith skillfully pivots from wry humor to real tenderness toward her quirkily engaging characters. The crisis over Herb and Susan’s move climaxes in a wild ride in Herb’s canary yellow Porsche Carrera, sparking the titular alert, as he and Dee Dee speed through the Florida Keys, soaking up their omnipresent beauty and kitschiness, on their way to Disney World, where Dee Dee hopes to realize her dream of meeting the Disney princesses. Beneath the novel’s occasionally frothy surface beats a compassionate, generous heart.

A warmhearted story of improbably matched characters trying to reclaim their lives.