Free The Devil You Know: A Novel by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

disease. Stepping Stones to Hepatitis: A Visit to Margaret Fairley Park.
    You go out of your way to become a respected writer, and they name a park after you in a neighborhood of addicts.
    There were two girls in the playground, both under six. The bigger one was a master at the monkey bars. She whipped back and forth, skinny legs kicking momentum. Her hands were red from the cold of the bars. The smaller one was named Jenny and she just sat under the jungle gym and cried. Sometimes the sister’s legs accidentally kicked her as they went by and then she cried louder. Jenny and her gymnast sister had a fat white mother waiting for them on the opposite bench, smoking a cigarette and wearing a black Dirty Dancing sweatshirt under a hooded parka. She had a purple bandana around her neck. In the frozen sandpit there was a blond baby in a puffy green snowsuit staggering around with a Filipina nanny holding on to her two hands at all times.
    So that’s reflective of what you’ve got down there: rows of town houses, some of them painted, mainly concrete steps and porches, some of them still operating as rooming houses and some of them occupied by lawyers with pagers and landscape architects. And nannies.
    I left my empty cup on the bench and crossed over to have a little walk around. When I looked back, Jenny had left her spot under the monkey bars and was using my coffee cup as a snow scoop. She was making a row of tiny castles, like we were at the beach and this was hot summertime.
    Brunswick was as permanent as it got for my mother, until shehooked up with my dad. Her old house bordered on an alley that ran along behind Ulster Street. There was a rooming-house look to it. It probably had four bedrooms. You could fit twenty-five homeless kids in a house that size, on floor mattresses. Maybe it’s just that moving out on my own had made it more comfortable for me to like her. Or to find her intriguing, as a human. That happens. I’d never given the place a second thought when I was younger, but now if I was walking by, I tried to picture my mother, seventeen and standing on the porch with a kerchief tied around her hair.
    I knew she used to clean houses for money, no contract, just under-the-table cash. She’d worked out a deal with a guy named Nathan Laskin who ran some frat houses and unofficial residences for professional students at U of T: Xi Psi Phi for dentists, Phi Delta Phi for lawyers, Alpha Epsilon Pi for Jews. This was when fraternities were respectable and not just drug nests. Or, at least, not known to be drug nests.
    Nathan had made a deal with whoever was supposed to actually be in charge of fraternity administration. He was basically a sub-contractor. This allowed him to avoid the bureaucratic nightmare of official hiring and wage policies. It also allowed him to cut corners and save a few bucks here or there, by feeding cheap pork liver to the orthodox guys and saying it was beef, or hiring teenaged girls to keep house and clean toilets. Enter my mother and her dust cloth.
    To hear my mother tell it, Nathan Laskin was practically a savior, because while the rest of her roommates were out panhandling or stealing fifty-cent items from Honest Ed for resale on the corner, she’d get up every afternoon and go clean Victorian houses in the nicest part of town. The frat houses were shit holes, of course, being occupied by a bunch of young guys who’d never learned to pick their own underwear off the floor, but it kept her from turning tricks, which it’s been suggested is how the other girls were making a living. I’m sure Nathan Laskin made a few offers of that variety, but my mother was okay to proceed without a wage increase, so they stuck to the original terms.
    Living in that place was more or less a refugee culture. None of the kids who slept there were from the city, and all of them came from situations that needed escaping. Most of them were from the suburbs, Scarborough or Milton, although there were a