Toronto, where Yoli makes her home, is both Yolandi Von Riesen’s domestic base and the place she repeatedly has to return to while family crises draw her elsewhere. Its role is rendered through practical obligations—a daughter’s messages, a son’s childcare, an unsettled apartment—rather than through a grand portrait of the city. The name Tkaronto offers a counterpoint to civic self-promotion: in the account given, it means trees standing in water.

Name and sense of place

The novel notes that Toronto is spelled Tkaronto in the Mohawk language and explains the name through its reference to trees standing in water. Yolandi appreciates that Canadian cities were named for features such as mud, trees, and water, especially when those names are set against inflated contemporary labels such as financial hub or technology centre. The observation gives the city a modest, physical identity: its significance need not depend on claims of cosmopolitan distinction or commercial prestige.

Home and family responsibilities

Toronto is where Yolandi’s children’s lives continue while she is away. During a stay in Winnipeg, she receives a text from Nora in Toronto asking about Elf and seeking permission to have her belly button pierced. The message brings an ordinary adolescent request into the same exchange as concern for Elf, showing how family attention at home persists alongside the emergency elsewhere.

Yolandi eventually expects to return to Toronto so Will can resume his classes after looking after the baby. Her departure from Winnipeg is therefore shaped not only by the crisis there but also by the care arrangements and responsibilities awaiting her at home. The city functions as the point to which the family’s divided schedules must be reconciled.

The household in her absence

A handwritten letter later describes the Toronto apartment while Yolandi is away in Winnipeg. Ants have appeared, and the landlord attributes the infestation to the apartment’s filth; Yolandi instead suspects a more general process of decay, while allowing that the household is messy. She has placed small trays of poison around the apartment. The detail records domestic disorder without turning it into a simple moral judgment: the disagreement over its cause is part of how she understands the fragile, imperfect household.

The letter also reports that Will has gone back to New York and that Nora has a boyfriend, a classmate from Sweden who is in Toronto on a scholarship. These updates make the apartment a point of connection to children whose lives are changing even when Yolandi is elsewhere. Toronto’s place in the narrative is consequently less a fixed refuge than a lived-in home that must be maintained, returned to, and kept in relation to its absent and growing occupants.