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we’re suited to one another.” The son was determined not to return to Thunder Bay, where “the stupid cops like to pick on me.”
    So he now had the unforgettable memory of this woman and her lunk-head son moving into his house and making a nervous wreck of him. By the time he’d got them back on a bus, three months had gone by in which he’d paid Toivo’s bail three times and failed to stave off Ritva Pekkenen’s efforts to move most of his mother’s Helsinki knick-knacks to the basement in exchange for junk she’d found in local yard sales. They would be “house mates for now, nothing more,” she’d said, and he was not about to argue. Yet she’d behaved as though his home were hers. She invited neighbours in for tea in the afternoons — women who had not been inside the house since the death of Arvo’s mother. She’d decided what groceries Arvo must buy. She’d complained when Arvo spent too much time in his workshop, and tried hard to train him to spend his evenings reading the paper and “keeping company with Toivo and myself,” instead of ducking back out to his “greasy engines and such.”
    He’d been ashamed of himself even then for putting up with this, but he’d suspected it was his own fault. It was his punishment for not investigating this woman somehow, before writing to her. But how could he have known she would show up without so much as a phone conversation?
    For his daily before-dinner sauna he’d locked the door from the inside for fear she would surprise him one day by entering, stripping off, and joining him on the upper bench, then later use this as an excuse for insisting upon a trip to a justice of the peace. While he sat sweating on the upper bench he tried to recall what he’d imagined when he’d written that letter.
    Wrenches and screwdrivers disappeared from his workshop and reappeared on the walls of the pawnshop in town. He found himself paying to rescue an electric drill that he’d only recently paid for in a hardware store. The boy did not bother denying that he’d had something to do with this. When the police occasionally kept him overnight after finding him drunk and pestering folks on the main street of town, they apologized to Arvo for not having the legal right to keep him longer. “Maybe if you let him wreck your truck or burn your sauna down we could put him away for a while.”
    But Toivo stole only items you didn’t remember you had until you went to use them.
    On evenings when he wasn’t out getting himself into trouble, he sprawled across the chesterfield, with his huge feet up on the arm, watching something his mother had chosen for him to watch on television. He had no homework to do since he’d refused to go anywhere near the local school so long as his mother was uncertain how long they’d be staying on.
    Then one night the boy had trouble finding the doorknob — or maybe even the door — in order to let himself into the house. He’d tossed stones at his mother’s window to get her up from her bed to let him in, but before she’d got to the door a stone had broken through the glass and fallen against a decorative crystal bowl of his mother’s, causing a visible crack to travel around its waist.
    Although the bowl was only one of several, and the fissure did not cause the bowl to fall in pieces, Arvo rushed out of his bedroom wearing only the sagging bottoms of his striped pyjamas and clasped both hands around the boy’s neck. He uttered several words he hadn’t used since he’d been a teen himself. The boy gurgled. The mother screamed. The boy’s eyes grew large. The mother, cursing, slapped at Arvo from every side, but the hands would not let go.
    And did not let go until the eyes rolled up and the body went limp.
    “You beast!” screamed the woman from Thunder Bay. “You’ve killed him!”
    But the boy was still alive enough to pack their belongings into the grey suitcases and carry one of them out to the bus stop, where he waited