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

She got on the streetcar and sat across from me with both hands clutching her stomach and a look of quiet terror.

    O kay—so is this February weather now?
    I’d called David from my desk.
    It’s not better, he said. It’s not because it keeps changing. Do you get it? The ground needs to freeze and stay frozen.
    Or thaw and stay thawed, I said. That’s my vote. Are you still tree-climbing this summer?
    A few years earlier he’d spent a summer in Junior Rangers planting trees. With the encroaching pressure from his mother around A Sensible Business Degree: Why David Should Get One, he’d been looking at escaping the city for another forestry gig come spring.
    I can pick up a firefighting contract, he said. Wildfires. They fly you in via helicopter.
    Where?
    Northern Quebec. Or else Labrador.
    I was quiet for a minute.
    I’d still live in camp, he said. But the money’s way better. Wanna come plant trees? Take a break from the Don Jail Daily?
    I didn’t answer that, either.
    Hey, I said. I found the hat. Thanks.
    What hat?
    My hat. I left my hat and mittens at the park before I tried to grocery-kill you. Remember? You left the hat at my doorstep? But no mittens. Or else someone took them.
    Not me, David said. I mean, I didn’t leave you anything.
    I could hear him turn on the kitchen tap on his end of the line. The rush of water hitting the bottom of the steel sink and the change in pressure when he switched the faucet to spray.
    That’s weird then, I said.
    Nah, anyone will do that. Put the hat at the closest doorstep.Like when you’re out walking and someone’s hung a baby shoe they found up on the fence, or on a fire hydrant or something. He was banging around the kitchen, dropping cutlery into a drawer with more cutlery already inside. Maybe you lost it right in front of the house, he said. Lucky.
    Are you making breakfast still? I said. It’s like one o’clock. I’ve been at work for five hours.
    Think about the summer, David said. Working vacation. Write an exposé.
    What if I’m urgently needed at the Don Jail?
    I figure I’m irresistible in uniform, David said. But don’t worry. I’ll fight you off.

    I came home balancing a tray of leftover muffins and white-bread sandwiches from a meeting I hadn’t even gone to. The muffins had been left in the little kitchen on my floor at work. They had a clear plastic dome for a lid that clicked soundly into place. I thought that in itself was worth the price of admission on claiming the leftovers.
    When I was a Girl Guide as a kid, we had this trick of weighing down our camping hats with those little plastic tags that seal up bags of bread from the grocery store. Not twist ties. We all saved those bread tags and clipped them up along the edge of our hats, fifty or sixty of them at a time, so that the wind couldn’t blow the hats away. Today if I see a bread tag lying in the street, it’s everything I can do not to lean down and pick it up and bring it home. There’s a part of my brain that just kicks in. They’re very useful. So I have a long and resolute history when it comes to collecting garbage. When I’m old, little children will see me coming and say, Here comes Crazy Bread Tag Lady.
    I came into the kitchen and set my new muffin dome down on the table and switched on the light. Something red caught my eye, just outside the window on the fire escape. The color stood out against the ice. My red-striped mittens. They were laid outcarefully, like an X. I cracked the lock on the emergency door and stepped outside. The temperature had fallen steadily all day. It was cool and slippery. The water from a long row of melting icicles had frozen slick on the landing. I held on to the rail and slid out to where the mittens were and brought them inside. They were dry and clean.

    I think it’s sweet, David said. He leaned his forehead against my kitchen window. You have a secret admirer.
    It’s creepy, I said.
    It’s just one of the guys upstairs. Where were