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easily with one hand while he does the work with the other. So he’s doing well enough for a man just shy of his fifties. He’s got a few deep lines in his face that make it richer when he frowns or laughs.
    When I was little, my mother stayed home to look after me. She was the kind of mother who made peanut-butter-and-sprouts sandwiches. Instead of jam. We always had jars of fermenting yogurt in the stairwell to the basement, covered over with cloth and elastic bands. I had a playroom and another room down there, a crawlspace art room where I was allowed to paint on anything, walls, floor, ceiling, whatever. Other kids liked my house because of stuff like that and despite the weird food. When I was six I went over to my friend Melissa’s for dinner. Her parents had a TV on the kitchen counter and we ate Velveeta-stuffed hotdogs. The cheese came already right inside the hotdog. They were like smoky miracles.
    I didn’t have grandparents around because my father was from Vancouver. My mother’s family was all up north. She grew up in a place called Chapleau that was full of French people and lumberjacks. Near Quebec but not in it. She lived up there in the woods like Laura Ingalls, only with parents who were crazy. She told stories about them like she was the lost sister of the Brothers Grimm. They were hungry most of the time because there were six kids, which is why she only ever wanted one child: so she could feed that one kid peanut butter and sprouts and be generally sane.
    Her family had a garden and they’d tent over the vegetables because the season was short, she said. So the tent helped keep theground warm for long enough to get at least a few green things, beans and snap peas. Carrots and turnips and potatoes you could have without much work.
    She had four sisters and a brother who was the youngest, and all the girls looked after him. He didn’t have his own bed because he was an accidental baby and there was no more room, so he took turns sleeping in the sisters’ beds every night. The brother’s name was Sully. He died when he was six and my mother was ten because he had pneumonia and the weather was too bad to get any doctors or for the father to get into town for medicine. The next year her oldest sister went through the ice with her boyfriend, on his Ski-Doo. The sister was sixteen and should already have known better, but not much to do out there in wintertime. People drink.
    Her parents had wicked fights.
    Her father came out of the woods with whatever he’d managed to shoot. Mostly it was birds but sometimes it was rabbits, and if you didn’t want to eat it they beat the shit out of you, because that’s all there was to it.
    My mother, mostly, she said. My father was always sorry if he hit you. Later on, he was sorry.
    When he fought with her mother sometimes he hit her, too, and then locked himself in the car. To keep away from her. He had three copies of Guns & Ammo Magazine and an old Auto Trader that he kept in the glove compartment so he could switch gears from fighting. Her mother chased him out there, so he locked the door to keep himself inside the car and her out.
    One time she was out there in her nightgown, my mother said, and just her slippers on in all this snow, and she takes a chunk of firewood and smashes in the headlights of the car while he’s in there.
    And my father’s sitting there, doing the Guns & Ammo crossword or whatever. He was whistling.
    When she was sixteen my mother moved down to Toronto by hitching a ride with her teacher. I don’t know if the teacher knew she was running away. Maybe he did. Maybe he thought it couldn’t beworse. When I was a kid I thought all teachers were nice and he was just doing her a favor and driving her someplace like grown-ups do. Now I figure she must have had some trade worked out with him.
    She lived in bad places. She lived in one place with about ten other kids. Two rooms plus a kitchen.
    I got to sleep on a real bed, on legs, she