When both girls were in college, and before that, when one was and the other had the little Echo to drive to high school and didn’t need one of them to pick her up anymore, Gwen and he would teach and hold office hours at the same time on the same days in the same building on campus. After school, they liked to stop off at a bagel shop on the way home to buy a half-dozen bagels. Then, as one of them drove, they’d each eat a bagel with nothing on it, he usually an everything bagel and she a sesame. Then she went on a gluten-free diet — he forgets why, but she stuck to it — and they’d stop off at the same store after school and he’d eat a bagel as they drove and she’d finger around the bottom of the bag for the seeds of the poppy and sesame bagels and the garlic and onion bits from the everything bagels and eat those. “We should ask the people at Sam’s Bagels if they could make a gluten-free bagel,” he said once when they were driving home. “There’s got to be a market for it, just as there seems to be for banana and blueberry and chocolate and Old Bay seasoning bagels and, around St. Patrick’s Day, green bagels, all of which we hate. It isn’t fair that I get to eat a whole bagel, when we’re so hungry, and you only get what’s fallen off in the bag.” She said “I doubt I’d want to eat a gluten-free bagel. Amaranth? Millet? Brown rice or quinoa? I’m sure they’d all be tasteless and difficult to chew. These dregs will hold me till we get home.”
