“No,” Josie said. She rested her head in her hands. Natalie sighed, but said nothing, and they sat there in silence. The tornado in Josie’s stomach had made its way back down to the root of her abdomen, but it still rolled gently around her insides, and Josie pressed hard on her belly. There would be the interment service and then the reception at the house and then some forced goodbyes in the morning, and then she could vanish. But vanish into what? She seemed to have taken so many steps away from Africa that she thought she might not be able to find her way back. Devesh had eclipsed everything, made Ghana a distant smudge. Devesh—even his name in her head made her catch her breath. She pushed the heels of her hands into her closed eyes and felt book-ended into this one moment.

When the doors opened, the metal frame nearly hit Josie across the lower back, and she stood quickly, walked down the steps, and into the parking lot. Natalie followed.

“Did you drive?” Josie asked.

“We’re not leaving,” Natalie said.

“I just want to sit in the car.”

Natalie gave Josie the keys and they made their way to the car. It was parked close to the funeral home, and Josie had to slide down in the passenger seat to keep from being seen. Still, from where she sat, she could see the steady stream of black-clad bodies make their way to their cars, and then she saw her father. He looked tiny even with her aunt’s thin arm around his shoulder, and he looked tired and old. Josie forced herself to imagine him dead, laid out in a dark mahogany casket identical to her mother’s. Besides his work, her mother had been his life, her mother and herself, and now her mother was dead, and Josie had excommunicated herself, and now he would have no one. She could easily imagine him as one of those perfectly healthy men who die shortly after their wives. He would die, and she would add another baby block to the already towering stack of guilt.