When Roger died from an aneurysm a decade later, Vivian grieved quietly for a year and then sold the San Francisco apartment and brought her ten-year-old son Brendon to Detroit. By then, Wes was a handsome, divorced curmudgeon. He proposed to Vivian in his matter-of-fact way the first time they had dinner after she got to town, after insulting her musical taste, in the middle of a conversation about challenging the mayor. Whenever she told the story, she said she shrugged, grinned and said, “Why not?” They married the next day at a courthouse, united by respect and scholarship.

For thirty years Wes and Vivian had organized and thought and shaped the city, side by side. While he lived, she often looked to him for leadership, or thought of her work as supporting his. When he died after a short battle with cancer, she decided to continue moving his ideas for the rest of her life, humility keeping her from understanding that the ideas had been collaborative since he’d met her. Her love and grief grew their ideas into a beacon until people from far and wide turned to Detroit to learn ways to live beyond capitalism, beyond competition.

When she’d had words, she’d greeted students and visitors from her throne, an armchair draped in a nubby rainbow colorblock afghan, next to the window with its defunct air conditioner. Her kingdom was the yellow house over on Goethe, which she’d purchased with Wes, decorated with pieces of art that they’d brought back from their political travels together and, after his death, every photo of him she had.

After Brendon was killed, Mama Vivian went silent. People still came. They would show up unannounced to Kama’s front door, having trekked for days to get to the city, the thinker Vivian Chin. Kama had set Vivian up in the cool cave of the living room, propped up by soft pillows never placed quite right. Vivian listened as her visitors shared whatever they needed to share—gratitude, critique, insecurity, longing, questions she could no longer answer.

Bab, an eccentric Black local, had been a weekly visitor for a decade, the only regular for the last couple years. She had gone to visit her daughter in Wisconsin for a few weeks and missed the start of the apocalypse. She was used to letting herself in, so Dune was caught off guard, having completely forgotten her. Now Bab birkenstocked into the kitchen with her standard mystery casserole—in tupperware, sealed in a massive ziploc. Her upward reaching curls and wide earnest eyes evoked elves or fairies. Her clothing was remarkably nondescript.

“There you are! You gotta get outside it is a gorgeous d— Darling?” Bab didn’t know yet, it was in the tone of her voice.

Dune found she couldn’t look up. “My mom died.”