Marta had taken this picture, her face soft, sun-kissed and smiling in the foreground. Dune angular, cool and dark-eyed in contrast. Dune was mentally berating her past self—she’d always known better than to put a “happy couple” shot as her profile pic, had given into Marta’s sweet persuasion. Dune wasn’t into social media, didn’t trust it. But Marta felt the opposite, that things weren’t real if they weren’t documented, shared. She wanted everyone to know she “had a man.”

Now none of the good solo pictures on Dune’s phone showed her with her painfully tight cornrows, and she didn’t feel like taking a new pic today.

Kama was washing the breakfast dishes, talking mostly to herself with moments of raised volume, which Dune felt compelled to respond to with grunts, amens. It was sticky hot, all the windows were open in gummy sills, fans twisting their necks in every doorway.

Mama Vivian, Dune’s paternal grandmother, once a formidable Chinese activist in Detroit movements for racial and economic justice, was sitting on her throne in the living room just around the doorframe. Anyone who complimented the big old doors would learn from Kama that they were the “original wood,” though Dune couldn’t say which wood that was exactly and she doubted her mother could name it either.

The shadowy living room was the coolest place during the summer, its windows blocked by the neighbor’s house and the wilderness that grew between the two buildings. The air didn’t move much, but it didn’t boil either.

The configuration was familiar that morning. When Kama cooked or did dishes, Dune often sat like this, at the other end of the table, ignoring her mother companionably. Mama Vivian rarely entered the kitchen when Kama or Dune were in there.

The kitchen was a square room at the back of the house. It felt permanently crowded due to a monstrous table that Kama had gotten for free after someone else’s divorce. They would never have been able to afford such a piece. It was a single slab of rosewood, meant for a dining room with a chandelier, in a suburb—not this railroad of tight spaces. As a family they’d sat around the table for meals a handful of times, mostly calendared holidays, squeezing into mismatched chairs that knocked against the edges of the room.

Their love for Kama showed in the swallowed complaints.

More often they took plates into the living room, eating on little golden trays that folded up and stacked in the corner. Other than Kama, the table was the only thing in their too-small house that was unapologetically big.