To escape an addiction, a young blind man in California steps into a station wagon with his friends and their foster kids to deliver a handmade casket to a dying grandfather in Florida. As they battle their way across the southern half of the nation, this rag-tag American family falls prey to love and lies, greed and violence, crime and Katrina. With a voice reminiscent of John Irving, Nodine produces a classic road-picture novel that is part Travels with Charley , part As I Lay Dying , and part On The Road . Touch and Go is a rich and rangy story about the careful and careless ways we treat each other, and ourselves, in a fast-paced, changing world. Kevin, the novel's blind narrator, is one of the most perceptive figures in recent fiction. And his desire to do no harm is contagious. Through Kevin's rich senses and boundless compassion, Nodine gives us a multicultural portrait of a true America. And he does so with deep affection for everyone along the way. " Touch and Go is a strong debut -- a high-velocity vision quest that keeps surprising and surprising." -- Jonathan Franzen , author of Freedom "Nodine's cinematic novel deserves to be hailed as one of the year's finest fiction debuts. In addition to creating a memorable cast [of] characters..., Nodine treats readers to a realistic portrayal of multicultural America and manages to make the plot pivot at the height of Hurricane Katrina." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A winning debut, a stunning vision of the fractured modern American family seen through the heightened observations of a man who has embraced his disability." -- Booklist "A rare experience...beautifully written... Jack Kerouac meets Huck Finn, with a dash of 21st century Tennessee Williams... Touch and Go insists upon the urgency of human connection, the sense that we too are ... traveling toward one thing and invariably arriving at something completely different." -- Christine Waters, Santa Cruz Sentinel "And the writing? Totally incredible. Set your skepticism about a blind narrator's ability to present a fully-realized world aside because you. will. be. floored... Touch and Go marks the arrival of an astounding new voice in fiction and is destined for this year's 'Best Of' lists, no doubt." -- Book Lady's Blog Thad Nodine grew up in Florida and now lives in Santa Cruz. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many magazines. Touch and Go, which won the Dana Award for the Novel, is his first novel. TOUCH AND GO By THAD NODINE UNBRIDLED BOOKS Copyright © 2011 Thad Nodine All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-60953-061-7 Chapter One Before we left California, we lived in a hodgepodge of a house where you couldn't get anywhere without walking around something else. Isa and Patrick slept in a rear room you had to walk outside to enter. Their two foster kids had small rooms along the hallway, but you had to walk through Ray's tidy nook to get to Devon's burrow, with its piles of denim, t-shirts, and rumpled magazines. I lived in a tiny room off the kitchen. Summer's liberties had helped the kids loosen up with us, the way a common change of routines draws people closer, but by August the heat of Burbank didn't feel much like freedom. In a couple of weeks, Isa, Patrick, and the boys were driving cross-country on a family vacation of sorts, to visit Isa's dying father in Florida. I wasn't planning to join them. At the time, I didn't think of us as family so much as people who needed each other. I can admit this now: I was still in love with Isa. Most people walk on autopilot. For me, steps understand; I navigate based on the supervision of surfaces. From the bus stop, our driveway was five paces past an odd slant in the sidewalk, which had been lifted by a tree that no longer existed. We didn't have a front path leading from the street, just a wide expanse of concrete where the trucker who'd lived there before us used to nose right up to the house. With all that driveway, the hardest thing for me to find was our front door in the stucco wall. There was no stoop, just a threshold. On a sweltering day in the second week of August 2005, Ray guided me up the driveway, my hand gripping his thin shoulder, both of us hopping. Sweating. Laughing. Catching our breaths. As he reached for the doorknob, I stiffened at the sound of Isa's voice inside. "Isa" is pronounced with a long i like "Isaac," even though it's short for Isabelle. I'd always liked the way her voice warbled when she was upset, but that day, I bristled. I'd just lost the only real job I'd ever had, a part-time gig at the community paper, and I didn't want to face anyone—least of all Isa, who could always see through me. The editor who had laid me off had been at the newspaper one week. When I'd walked into his office, his keyboard clattered in spurts by the far wall, so I knew he was facing away from me, typing at his computer desk. I cleared my throat; his keys stopped. The rol