Right now, Paisley was not trying to tap eight on her fingers but, rather, trying to open her apartment mailbox. Her fingers ached from the cold and were not working. She stuck her hands between her thighs and clamped tight, just for a moment, to warm them up. The building was frigid. Month of April frigid.

She tried to open the mailbox again. Success. She pulled out flyers from pizza and Chinese food joints. There was also this month’s issue of Birders International, with a cover photo of a twitcher, a birder, from the UK. He was standing in a marsh in a soaked shirt that revealed his six-pack and, well, nipples. British water must be cold, thought Paisley. He was photographing a pair of critically endangered spoon-billed sandpipers, which the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, had brought over from the sandpipers’ home in Russia’s far east to start a breeding program. The cover of Birders International promised a centrefold, but it wasn’t clear if it would be of the birder or the bird. Both were enticing. Paisley couldn’t wait to rip into the magazine. And there was a fourth and final reminder from the building’s management about the impending eviction.

How could she forget?

The tenants had been getting notices once a month since September; the building, a utilitarian 1960s four-storey brownstone on Toronto’s Dale Avenue, just north of Bloor and Sherbourne, was slated for demolition. Everyone had to be out by May 14, six short weeks from now. This, of course, was having an effect on tenant morale. Many were elderly, like Paisley’s friend, Mrs. Feldman from 2b. They were upset about having to leave the place they’d called home for thirty or forty years and didn’t know what it meant for their next stage of life. Would their families dump them in a seniors’ home? Would they have to move in with their children, no matter how distasteful they found them?