He looked at the bowl. At the knife. But he was really staring in his head at Tanta, no longer in the kitchen performing cereal rituals but instead in the overstuffed chair by the window in the TV room upstairs, where she could continually revise her catalog of the neighbors' misdeeds and sip the tea into which she denied pouring a swig of apple brandy. During a commercial break on a Monday night when she'd sat with him to watch M*A*S*H*, she'd told him — Tanta who'd survived the Great Depression with guile, will, and a healthy mistrust of anyone she hadn't either broken or stolen bread with — “Once they take away the strings in the bananas, Brian, it'll be too late to save anything."

from “Your Takeaway”