The weather forecast for the Phoenix area this morning had been for clear, hot, sunny weather. But half an hour out from Sky Harbor, clouds had suddenly appeared and the plane had begun to shake. If there was one thing Delia couldn’t cope with, it was turbulence. At least in the physical sense, she thought as she got onto the on-ramp for I-10. There’s going to be enough emotional turbulence before this is over. Ideally, not mine. But turbulence in the air was another matter. “Oh, I’m sorry about this,” the flight attendant had said when Delia had asked her about it. “It’s just the monsoon. Though it’s kind of early this year. Climate change, I guess.” Delia hadn’t thought that the words “Phoenix” and “monsoon” belonged in the same sentence. Yet, as she now discovered, every summer the people here endured a period during which in the morning or evening there would be a sudden peak in the humidity, immediately followed by a thunderstorm, which then cleared itself away and left the skies cleansed and the temperature a little lower.
