We were moving because Eric’s office had moved there, and commutes from Bay Ridge to Long Island City uncomfortably reminded us of Latin American immigrants knifed to death by bigots in subway cars en route to one of their three jobs at two in the morning.

Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you’ve got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker.

It did not seem possible, much as he craved the comfort of a woman of intelligence, of humor and balance and perception.

The crunch of the mustard-spiked crust somehow brings the unctuous smooth richness of the liver into sharp relief. It’s like the silky soul of steak. You have to close your eyes, let the meat melt on your tongue, into your corpuscles.

Like the muscles knew from the beginning that it would end with this, this inevitable falling apart... It’s sad, but a relief as well to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds.

Last night I had a dream that I was about halfway up a sheer cliff, endlessly high. Up ahead of me was, it seemed, everyone I’d ever known – the guys at the shop, my family, Gwen, Eric, D – and they were pulling ahead, climbing fast, leaving me behind. I tried to call out but found I had no voice, that my words slurred and died in my mouth, that I could not be heard. I awoke with a terrified lurch, unable to scream. I have this dream all the time.

You know that dejection that comes upon you when you realize that the person you’re talking to might as well be from Jupiter, for all the chance you have of making them get what you’re saying? I hate that.

The thing you learn with Potage Parmentier is that “simple” is not exactly the same as easy.

For nearly a week I neither cooked nor grocery shopped. Instead, all of our various families took Eric and me out for Mexican food, for barbecue, for beignets. We ate cheese biscuits with Rice Krispies, and spiced pecans, and red beans and rice, and gumbo, and all those other things that New Yorkers would turn up their noses at, but New Yorkers don’t know everything, do they? This is what Texas, and family, are for.

The powdered sugar had caramelized and blackened into a sucking tar pit in which my ladyfingers languished like so many sunk mastadons.