Kama came up with solutions for Brendon to attempt as needed and he was game for every attempt, but they were never long-term solutions. They were lovers, scholars, activists—the people were always calling.

While they rarely attended to the structural needs of the house, Kama loved to fill it with beauty. This African woman had surrounded herself with proof of her connection to a continent that had never been home in this lifetime.

Senegalese masks watched them from the walls. Cloth from her trips to Nigeria and Ghana were flung over every surface and pinned taut above windows to serve as curtains. Mountains of beads, necklaces and bracelets piled up and spilled over each table, handfuls of which Kama would grab and adorn herself with on her way out the door.

The furniture was thrift store finds, gifts, inheritances. To come into this house, an item needed a story. It could be a discount, a tragedy or an act of mastery, it just needed to be interesting. Kama found well-used things, Brendon allowed them.

Brendon hadn’t much cared how the place looked. His weakness was books, newspapers, research. The touches of him around the house had been piles of books he was in the middle of reading next to his chair in the living room, stacks of newspapers on the back of each toilet, open history books and Detroit coffee table photography collections on the kitchen table.

Dune could still remember how Kama would flow behind Brendon, telling him to clean up. What she meant was, your stuff isn’t beautiful. Only beautiful mess was allowed. His place in the house was the basement, where he’d had an office and organized his research about the city near the washer and dryer.

If they’d lived alone, the house would have been a hoarder fright. Being parents gave them some boundaries.

When Brendon died, Kama had slowly gathered his things from around the house, reluctantly, like he might come back and finish this book, or that paper.

Dune had found a cup of tea next to her parents’ bed a month after her father was killed. It had grown into a mystical mold installation, so she’d washed it. When Kama noticed its absence, she’d screamed at Dune in anger for the first and only time in their lives.

Now, Dune understood.

She didn’t want to toss the sponge Kama had been using at the sink. She didn’t want to put away the sundress printed with women going to market, wares piled on their heads, the dress her mother had laid out to change into after breakfast the day she’d disappeared from herself. It waited on the bench at the end of the bed, as usual.