When Dune was a teenager, Kama had sat her down to talk about dating and sex. Kama had shared that her father had picked a man in the community who he wanted Kama to marry. And she had hated the man, found him boorish and regressive. And she had hated her father for trying to arrange her life, control her in this way.

And then she met Brendon.

Dune knew that her parents had secretly dated for half a year because Kama didn’t want to bring the wrath of her father down on sweet Brendon’s head. Dune didn’t know that making out on the hood of Brendon’s car out on Belle Isle had become making love in the back seat in the woods near the airport, where Dune was conceived. But she knew that Kama had become pregnant.

Kama’s father never forgave her for getting pregnant out of wedlock, defying his matchmaking, having sex. He said she was a fast girl and couldn’t be the daughter he’d raised. For her first years as a young mother, her father’s judging rage had shaped her entire family against her, such that she had received nothing in the way of contact or support. She acted like she didn’t care until the day she died.

She and Brendon had eloped and Kama had let her family slip away into their anger; had let her organizing community, Brendon and Dune become home.

This house was the place Kama had trusted to hold her child. When the time came, she had shared the house with her dead love’s silent mother, who had never approved of Kama’s protest-oriented politics.

Kama had been generous here.

In this house she had known abundance. Here, she had gathered all that she had in this disappointing world.

When Kama and Brendon bought the house it was a romantic notion. Kama had been round with child, this foreclosed and boarded up place had room to grow, even though it was in a seedy location, near the overnight homeless shelter. It was affordable with a few loans because the bottom had fallen out of the housing market. It was a fixer upper.

Neither of them were fixers by nature, so the things that had needed doing decades ago mostly still needed doing. The upstairs shower had a broken rolling door that had to be carefully balanced in both hands each time it was used. Three tiles on the kitchen counter were loose and no superglue would hold them in place for more than month. The pantry cabinet wouldn’t close—there were rubber bands and nails to hold it, and they only worked during dry seasons. The windows needed to be covered in plastic each winter to create some semblance of fortified boundary between the snow and the hearth.