Candy says something funny and the baseball wives all burst into a laughter so loud it carries through the triple-pane glass and out onto the well-swept patio. The woman has charisma, Melissa will give her that. Inside, Candy holds up another bra, shimmies her shoulders. Another wave of laughter.

Melissa decides in that moment: they can all stay. The beautiful baby and the cleat chaser and the randy politician, all those women she hated and those she thought were her friends. Instead, she will go. She will slink back through the yard and up the hillside and through the desert mountains. She will go into the night, and no one, but no one, will notice she is gone.

SEVENTH

The Hohokam wanted more control than Flood or No Flood, and so developed technology to build canals. And not ditches or divots, the kind of grooves a focused batter can dig out with his cleat. Channels, fifty feet wide, twenty feet deep, gravity pulling water along for nearly twenty miles. That’s some sort of relay play, as good a 6–4–3 as the Lions’ own horn could ever hope to string together.

“Masters of the Desert,” that was another name for them—later. Then, they were just farmers, guys playing well—if not an undefeated season, then one where they sat comfortably at the top of the standings. Maize, beans, squash, and cotton grew where the bluegrass thrives today. They ate like sluggers at the midnight buffet, then traded away what they didn’t need for more of everything else. It was the kind of surplus that would make any owner lick his chops, thinking about all the players and coaches and real estate he could buy. The sort of excess that’d get a star’s agent on the phone, talking opportunities, talking five-year deals, talking championship rings.

The Hohokam weren’t just king-of-the-hill farmers and master engineers, they were ballplayers, too. The men and women both played sport—how’s that for Title IX? For the guys it was a game not unlike basketball, with a hoop and ball; the ladies had one with sticks, something more akin to field hockey. Ball fields popped up every three miles, up and down Salt River, built as regular as bus stops on the Scottsdale–Tempe–ASU line. And these were not just meadows with trampled deer grass and a couple of half-sunk tree limbs marking fair and foul. No, a Hohokam field was a dug-out oval coated in caliche, stretching anywhere from eighty to two hundred feet. That’s like the stretch from the plate to shallow center, nothing small about it. They even constructed sloped, rising sides round the field, so a crowd could gather, sit down, and watch. Not a lot different from Salt River’s own outfield lawn, the patchwork of beach blankets and picnic baskets that fans spread out today.