The day before she drove east, her father had put one hundred thousand dollars in an account and handed her the checkbook. And there was more if she wanted. Plenty more. “Sweetie, please use the money. It’s a gift from me; your mother doesn’t even have to know,” he had said. It made Josie sick, nauseated by both her own spite and the way her father allowed it, her father who still gave her mother gifts and effusive cards on the anniversary of their first date, their first kiss, the day of their engagement. “No,” Josie had said, “I want to do it on my own,” and although this wasn’t exactly a lie—she did want to find her own way—it was about spite. “I refuse to tell people my daughter studies corpses,” her mother would say. “I don’t study corpses, Mother. I study rituals, Ghanaian rituals.” “It’s morbid, Josie. It’s just perverse,” her mother said, and Josie would feel the adrenaline pump from her heart to her fists—that overwhelming frenetic feeling—and before she knew it, she was storming out of restaurants, slamming doors, throwing glasses against floors. Her mother would stare at her, calm and collected, and tell her her anger was more suited to a four-year-old. “But then again,” she murmured, “you seem somehow stuck at four.” It was this comment that finally made Josie back off, go inside herself. Her mother could win any game with this. Because at four Josie’s world had turned upside down, and at four Josie seemed to slip from her mother in a matter of moments. No, Josie refused to be beholden to her mother any longer, and if she took the money, she would be beholden. Despite Josie’s efforts, even secrets had a way of revealing themselves to her mother.

The coffee shop was one of her usual study places—with bad coffee and pay-as-you-go Internet, it was usually empty and quiet, and Josie would often let Maddy nap in her stroller while she struggled with her Twi translation exercises or tried to get through whatever book she was reading. She had set herself the goal of a book a day, giving herself a break from the heap of social theory every three days with an ethnography. Today she had brought a book her advisor had already nixed from her Orals list. It was almost all photographs, but spectacular ones, and she thumbed through pictures of Ga customized coffins—giant tunas, colossal onions, body-sized airplanes. Only in Ghana could you be buried in a gigantic wooden Mercedes-Benz. Josie brought the book close to her face to make out the grillwork on the hand-painted car.

“You’ll strain your eyes doing that.”

Josie looked up and saw Devesh standing above her. He held a cup of coffee in one hand and a newspaper in the other.