She spooned a puree of garlicky lentils and peas into Mama Vivian’s mouth, slowly, waiting for the telltale swallow, interspersing the food with sips of water through a bent striped straw.

Mama Vivian accepted this care as if she wasn’t really there, not making eye contact with Dune, despondent, not rebellious. She seemed so over it all.

Dune explained that she was going out for a little while, she’d be back by lunchtime. She told her grandmother to stay put, take it easy. This was not a necessary directive, as the old woman no longer seemed interested in getting out of bed, but it comforted Dune to have said it, casting a protective order over her elder while she was away.

As Dune biked east, over to Elouise’s house, she felt like Mama Vivian’s detached mood had slipped into her. And with it, her impossible responsibility: every time she left, she risked getting sick far from the old woman, never coming home. Her grandmother relied on her completely now.

She knew there was a selfishness in her persistent work to keep Mama Vivian alive, a stubbornness, a fear of being alone. What value could these empty dying days have for the old woman after such a long and fascinating, powerful, interdependent life?

Dune knew she should let Mama Vivian know it was ok to go, that she didn’t have to hold on if she didn’t want to. She tried to craft the words in her mind but nothing solidified. The wind moved along her body and the aliveness drifted her mind away from death.

Her grandmother, old and absent but decidedly not sick, without the words of wisdom Dune longed for, was still solace.

It was her first time this far West since Kama was here, weaving through potholes that now had the flavor of sinkholes, wide and mysteriously deep. These portals in the tar told the lie of the paved road, positive proof that there was chaos below. Dune imagined falling into one of the holes and biking straight down, into the salt caves underneath the city, finding the tracks of another underground railroad through the crystalline heaps, coming out into another reality.

Dune had grown up hearing about the massive deposits of salt under this particular earth; her great-grandfather had possibly mined them for a while. As a child hearing these stories, she would ask, “Why isn’t the ground white like salt? Is that why vegetables are salty?”

The sun was out and up high, the clouds low and thin. The gray was coming and once it landed it would linger. In Michigan, gray was a season that encompassed most of the fall to spring. When Dune was four, Brendon had taught her that the gray existed in order to make it even better when the sun came out, and she couldn’t displace that truth with any adult theories.