“The next station is Summerhill—Summerhill Station, sweetie,” I hear her say. It scares the shit out of me, every time. Or there’s this one—the other stop announcement on all the older subway trains, on the Bloor and Yonge and Sheppard lines. “Arriving at Summerhill, sweetie—Summerhill Station,” my mother will say, in an echoing voice. Then I’ll hear her and the snowshoer laughing; I only occasionally see them in the underpass. Usually, when I see those two on the subway, or in Summerhill Station, they don’t speak at all.

As for the actual woman’s voice on the subway, she doesn’t say sweetie—I can’t imagine her saying it. I wouldn’t know who she was, if Matthew hadn’t told me. It was Matthew who noticed when the voice on the subway changed. It was sometime in 2007, Matthew said—when a new voice was prerecorded for the announcements on the older underground trains. I didn’t notice, but my mother must have noticed, and Matthew really liked the woman’s voice on the subway.

It would be some years later, in 2013, when Matthew told me her name. It was spring in Toronto. Matthew and I were watching some dumb game on TV. Matthew was scrutinizing his cell phone, too. He was twenty-two; I had the impression there was always something interesting on his phone. Em and I were in our seventies; we were dependent on Matthew to demystify the technology in our lives. Matthew showed us what we were doing wrong with our laptops and our cell phones; Matthew made the Internet more manageable.

That April evening, Em was watching the TV on a different channel in the kitchen. Obama was still president, but Em had been riled up since the 2010 midterm elections, when the Republicans retook control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Em hated the new Republicans more than she’d hated the old ones; she said the new ones hated Obama more.

“Tea Party assholes!” Matthew and I heard Em screaming; she must have been watching CNN.

“I’ll bet it’s Ted Cruz or Michele Bachmann,” Matthew told me.

“She said assholes, plural,” I reminded him.

“It’s Ted Cruz and Michele Bachmann—they’re both assholes,” Matthew assured me.

That was when his cell phone spoke to us; the voice on the subway was on his cell phone. “The next station is Bathurst—Bathurst Station,” the woman on the subway said.

“Her name is Susan Bigioni,” Matthew told me, handing me his phone. A short film was on Matthew’s cell phone, a Toronto Transit Commission film. Voices of the TTC, it was called.

Susan Bigioni speaks on camera for only ten seconds. “Arriving at Bathurst—Bathurst Station,” the bright-eyed brunette says, more sincerely than my mother, no fooling around.

“She works as a TTC communications assistant,” Matthew said.

“You’re our communications assistant,” I told him.

“I know,” Matthew said.