A Slice of Apple Pie
 Andrew Miller
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         It was late November—fresh snow on the ground—when my grandmother died after taking an apple pie out of the oven. She always used Northern Spy apples from their orchard: green, brushed with red stripes, the flesh white, juicy, aromatic, a bit sweet, a touch of acid. As a child, I marveled at the way she peeled them, the paring knife whisking around and around, teasing out one long, continuous strip. It was late afternoon and I had finished shoveling her sidewalk. ‘Tell me what your studying at college,’ she said as she set the pie on the counter, then fell over backwards, struck her head against Grandfather’s bird’s eye maple table.
         “She was dead before the ambulance came,” my mother said next morning as she cut the pie, apples cold, syrupy, firm and neatly stacked under the brown crust.

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