Sara is sad because she thinks my
squat stucco house in Toronto, where
she began renting a room in the sum-
mer of 2017, is infested with bugs.
“It’s just the occasional fly because
I don’t use screens,” I say, waving my
hand at the flung-open windows. A
summer breeze eddies around us. “So.”
The So is for finality, to get Sara out
the door to the University of Toronto
lab where she spends long hours dis-
secting brains for her PhD thesis,
because as I speak an enormous insect
is rappelling from the ceiling toward
Sara’s hair, its arms snapping hungrily.
“But you see here,” Sara’s brown eyes
well with worry as she rolls up her pant
leg to reveal a large red welt. “It is—
what is the word?”
“Oozing,” I say. Sara speaks excellent
English, with only an occasional lostphrase. (“I wish you could understand
me in Persian,” she once said. “In Per-
sian I’m witty and sophisticated.”)
“It’s just a mosquito bite,” I say, and
hope this is true. The Volkswagen-sized
bug—are those pincers?—is now inches
from her head. “Stop scratching.” As
the owner of a boarding house, I am
allowed to say bossy things like this.
Sara rents a room in my home, on
the second floor. Peter, a lovely, soft-
spoken teacher and musician, is in the
basement apartment. Until last March,
my son Kelly lived in the bedroom
beside Sara’s. He’s a grounded young
man with a quick mind. Home between
travel and work as a web developer,
Kelly played the role of the house-
hold pragmatist.
Housing so many entitles me to be
smugly satisfied that I’m on the supplyI’m sitting at my shiny white kitchen
table, round and bright as a happy face,
and talking to Sara, my boarder. Sara’s
face is not happy, and one of the perils
of turning your home into a boarding
house is an unhappy tenant.
reader’s digest
58 april 2020