While she fills a tin mug with four teaspoons of sugar, she catches sight of the letters under the sugar canister. They’re all from her grandmother, beseeching her to come home and explain herself, and they’ve all gone unanswered, though Zodwa goes to the building society to do banking as often as she can to send money home to her gogo. It helps assuage the guilt and she hopes it tells her grandmother what she can’t: that she loves her even though she’s lost; that she misses her even though shame keeps her away.

Once Ace’s breakfast is made, Zodwa gently shakes him awake and leaves before he can pull her down onto him. The man’s sexual appetite is insatiable. It’s bad enough having sex with him when she’s drunk and partially anesthetized to it. Doing it when she’s hungover is its own kind of hell.

Zodwa heads out of the shack, finds another stone in the laneway, and adds it to her brother’s shrine. As she touches the mass of rock, a vivid image comes to her of the very last time she saw Dumisa. He was impeccably dressed in their deceased father’s best suit even though he would be walking for hours on dusty roads ahead of two days of travel to Johannesburg. Her brother maintained, like their father before him, that a man who looked sharp was one who garnered respect. A well-dressed man, even if forced to his knees, had dignity.

Dumisa had bent down so he was at eye level with Zodwa and she’d blinked as his hat cast a shadow across her face, briefly blocking out the sun. Everyone said he looked like their father but since Zodwa didn’t remember him at all, she had to take their word for it. Dumisa wasn’t only strong and handsome, he was also clever and successful. Being his sister bestowed a special kind of status on her that she feared would weaken in his absence.

As Dumisa removed his hat and tucked it under his arm, Zodwa wanted to wrap her arms around his neck and beg him not to go. No one who left ever came back, including their mother, who’d gone away to work in the city two years prior with promises that the arrangement was only temporary. Dumisa was Zodwa’s protector and best friend. He was what made both the separation from their mother and their father’s death bearable. She couldn’t imagine a world in which he didn’t bring her red lollipops from the shop in town, or one in which he didn’t charm the white ladies at the church so he could dig through the charity bins for shoes that wouldn’t be two sizes too big for her.

“You must be good, little sister, do you hear me?” Dumisa said.