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

few from as far up as Barrie and Midland. My mother was the only one from the way-north. She found the house by hanging around the bus station and other places lost kids go. She’d talk to anyone under twenty-one and see what they knew about Toronto.
    When you’re living with a bunch of beggars and thieves, no one is taking care of themselves. The reason is a) no time for that and b) no one knows how, anyway. Sometimes when my mother tells her stories, the Brunswick house seems filled with artistry and a kind of familial solidarity. She’s also referred to it as a rat’s nest. She paid the extra ten bucks a month to sleep up high, away from the cockroaches, but also away from the other rats.
    She lived there a year. The guy who took the rent money made her nervous.
    Something wrong with him, my mother said. At first we just thought he smoked too much pot. He stared at you too hard if you talked to him. He had a smile that made him look slow-minded.
    But he wasn’t, she said. He had a devious intelligence.
    This is the thing with collecting housemates at the bus station. You get all kinds. There’s no good sorting method.
    He’d catch mice in glue traps and play with them like a cat.
    Some of the other girls had stories, my mother said. You didn’t want to be in the house with him. Once I walked into the kitchen and he was in there, alone. He had a mouse glued down and he stepped on it, one limb at a time. Listening to it scream.
    It took her a long time to make enough money to leave.
    So my mother woke up every day as early as she could and got dressed and left before anyone else was even awake. The frats were generally up around St. George and Bloor, which is about a ten-to-fifteen minute walk, depending on the length of your stride. She walked up there and ate some breakfast out of the frat house fridgeand then got going on scrubbing and washing things. She did one house every day, six days a week. On the seventh day, she sat in a coffeehouse all day and ate chocolate cake for lunch.
    Being young and living like that, you don’t have a lot of the things that other teenagers have. I’m not talking about bicycles and record players so much as the other stuff, the things your mom looks after for you, like doctor’s appointments and green vegetables and the right kind of coat for wintertime. Soft mittens.
    So one day my mother wakes up sore and can’t pee, and she’s afraid to tell any of her friends because they’ll just say she has syphilis, which she knows for a fact is flat-out impossible. Almost impossible. She gets up and goes to work anyway, and every day, it gets just a little bit worse. Seventeen is an optimistic and powerless age. You think you’ll be walking down the street one day and Richard Avedon will jump out with his camera and discover you. The lottery is like a life plan you’ve put on hold, until you have a spare buck to buy your winning ticket. Things are good or bad, sure. But more than that, they’re inevitable. If something hurts, you just let it hurt. You wait for it to go away, because what else is there to do?
    Then one day she’s at Xi Psi Phi, scraping out the sink with Old Dutch and she has to pee, and what she pees is blood.
    I don’t know if it’s because I was sick, or because of the sight of that blood, she said. I fell over. Right there in the bathroom. Out cold.
    And that’s where my father the dental student comes in and finds her and figures out that she needs some antibiotics. Her kidneys were infected, and those things turn nasty if you don’t treat them.
    What are the chances of a nice dental student falling for a teenaged maid? My father was from the other side of the country and his own mother had died when he was a kid. There was no opportunity for mother-in-law-type disapproval. Lucky for me. They got married in six weeks.
    I turned and walked back through the park, in part so I couldcheck in on Jenny and the snow castles. Her sister had come off the monkey bars