Something good happens because the crowd cheers and the car’s windows rattle. There’s a new hula girl on the blue car’s dashboard, which looks like the old hula girl on the old car’s dashboard, and she shakes her hips. Alex watches her sway for a minute and tries the air-conditioning again. Still hot. He climbs back into the space between the seats, reaches for his favorite ball, and starts counting its stitches again. He wonders some more about where Momma went, but he knows she’ll be back soon.

NINTH

Many things are improbable. Geology—all of it. Sharks, their general existence, but especially that they were once in Arizona. That woolly mammoths were, too. That Arizona was a sea, a swamp, anything at all other than this stark brown desert. That oceans dry up, that oceans surge, that mountains climb into mountains and then they start to shrink.