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shattered, and the bird ate what was inside.
    ‘How did the seagull know the clam was dead?’ Holly asked.
    I must get her a scopas suit, thought George. I’ll break into Frostig’s truck and steal one.
    ‘I know!’ said Holly. Freckles were sprinkled on her face. Her skin seemed lit from within. ‘If the clam is alive, he opens his eyes, and then the seagull knows not to eat him!’
    ‘Yes,’ said George. ‘That’s the answer.’
    She pondered for a moment. ‘But then how does the clam get a new shell, Daddy?’
    If George could have one wish, he would remake the world as Holly saw it. This Utopia would consist largely of cuddly ducks, happy ponies, and seagulls who spared live clams. ‘I don’t know how the clam gets a new shell,’ he said. Maybe he puts on a scopas suit instead, he thought.
    At the climax Carrie walked the nocturnal beach, gazing toward heaven and identifying the constellations. One of them was the Big Dipper. ‘Why is it called that?’ Holly asked.
    ‘It looks like a dipper.’ George was always careful to speak in complete, grammatical sentences around Holly. ‘Do you know what a dipper is?’
    ‘What’s a dipper?’
    Instantly George was off to the kitchen. He returned bearing a small saucepan that more or less resembled an ancient Greek dipper. He believed it was for melting butter.
    ‘I wish I could see the Big Dipper,’ Holly said.
    ‘One night soon we’ll go out and look for it.’
    ‘Daddy, I have something important to say. This is important. Could we go out and look for it now?’
    ‘You don’t have any shoes on.’
    ‘Could you carry me?’
    He seriously considered doing so. ‘It’s pretty cloudy tonight. I don’t think we could find it.’
    ‘Let’s try. Please.’
    ‘No, honey, it’s late,’ he said, extricating himself from her little finger. ‘We’ll look for it some other night. I’ll tell you a story instead.’
    ‘Goody.’
    He started out with the grasshopper and the ant, then suddenly realized he didn’t like the ending, and so he ad-libbed his way through the chronicle of a clumsy bunny who wanted, more than anything, to be able to ride a two-wheeler bicycle. The bunny tried and tried and kept falling off, covering his fragile body with little bunny bruises. (The wind could hurl you three hundred feet, young Gary Frostig had said.) Then one day the rabbit hutch caught on fire. The determined bunny leaped on his two-wheeler, raced to the fire department, and saved the day.
    ‘I wish I could ride a two-wheeler,’ said Holly.
    ‘You’ll learn,’ said George.
    ‘I know that,’ said Holly, slightly annoyed. She closed the book. ‘It’s going to be a long world.’

CHAPTER THREE
In Which the United States of America Is Transformed into a Safe, White Country
    Halloween was coming, the pumpkins were off their diets, and the little cemetery where George worked had acquired a ghost.
    When he first glimpsed the specter, she was contemplating him through the front window of the Crippen Monument Works. Inside the office, barrel-bellied Jake Swann perused a sales contract – a big order set in motion on Columbus Day when Jake’s uncle had come home and shot all of his immediate family dead – and as the customer reached for the pen to write his signature, George looked up.
    Spider webs and arabesques were scribbled on the window in frost. A blood-red October leaf was pasted to one pane. George and the specter locked eyes. While he sincerely doubted that the old woman was in fact a ghost – Unitarians did not believe in ghosts – her every aspect suggested a netherworld address. She wore a mourning ensemble, loose-fitting as a shroud: black cloth, black gloves, and black veil – raised. Her complexion had the greenish pallor of mold. Her frame displayed the jagged profile of a dead tree. When she smiled at him, jack-o’-lantern teeth appeared, and one of her eyelids collapsed in a wink.
    Ice formed in George’s gut. His throat tightened like