Meet our editor

My mother makes apple pie every Wednesday. Has, since 1962. The crust burns on the bottom. The filling is too sweet. We eat it because there is pie.

Last week I asked her why Wednesday. She frowned. “Because that's the day.”

Driving home in the rain, I thought of my father, who had died on a Tuesday in 1972. Who would not have known about the pie. Who would not have known that, for fifty years, his wife had been making it ready for him to come home, on Wednesday, sitting alone at the table with the cooling crust, waiting.

He gets on at Fulton, the same as every Tuesday. Briefcase. The kind of haircut you pay for. We have never spoken.

Today the train stops between stations. The lights go out. In the dark, his hand finds mine. Holds it.

The lights come back. He is looking out the window like nothing happened. I am looking at him.

At Brooklyn Bridge he stands. He does not look at me. He gets off.

Next Tuesday I will sit somewhere else. Someone will sit beside me. The lights will not go out. I will keep my hand in my own lap.

The dog had been ours for fourteen years when he stopped eating.

The vet said it was not a thing to fix.

We took him home in the towel he liked. We took him to the river he liked. We sat in the grass.

He put his head on my husband's knee. He looked, with great seriousness, at the water moving past, as if memorising it.

It was the last time he looked at anything.

A heron came down, then. Stood for a moment in the shallows. Lifted off again.

We watched it go. The dog did not look up.

The new boss called us in one at a time. Twenty minutes each. He had a list and a pen.

Janice came out crying.
Greg came out laughing.
Marisol came out and went straight to her desk and began packing.

When my turn came, the new boss did not look up. He read from his list. He explained that my position was being expanded. He explained that I would now be responsible for everything Janice had done, and everything Greg had done, and everything Marisol had done, in addition to my own. He said he would email about the raise.

My grandmother kept a goose. She fed it from her hand and called it by a name we were not allowed to say.

When she died, my mother put the goose in the back of the car and drove out past the city, to a pond where there were other geese.

The goose did not get out of the car.

We waited. The other geese came up to the water's edge. They did not call.

My mother eventually drove home with the goose still in the back. We did not say its name. We let it sleep on the porch.