Yoli buys a run-down house and brings her mother to live in Toronto

Yolandi Von Riesen buys a damaged house in Toronto with money left to her by her sister, Elfrieda Von Riesen, and brings their mother, Lottie, to live there with her and her daughter, Nora. The purchase follows Yolandi’s anguished consideration of whether to help Elfrieda seek an assisted death in Switzerland; after Elfrieda dies, the money she leaves becomes the means for a different act of care. Rather than resolving the family’s grief, the move gives it a place to be lived through together.

Inheritance and a changed decision

Elfrieda’s arrangements give Yolandi both financial support and a new responsibility. Along with her life insurance, Elfrieda leaves her a monthly payment of two thousand dollars for two years, intended to let her stay home and write. Elfrieda also provides for trust funds for Yolandi’s children and money for Lottie, while the rest of the estate goes to Nic. Yolandi decides to use the insurance money to buy a fixer-upper in Toronto, imagining that Elfrieda would have approved. But the decision is unsettled by questions the inheritance cannot answer: Yolandi wonders whether Elfrieda had ever meant to come and live with her, and whether Yolandi herself had ever truly intended to take her to Zurich.

That uncertainty reaches back to Yolandi’s earlier refusal. When Elfrieda begs her to take her to Switzerland, Yolandi says no and resists the idea of calling it one last request. Later, after learning that assisted death is legally possible in Switzerland for a person suffering from mental illness, she weighs a trip to Zurich against obtaining Nembutal in Mexico. She considers the legal and practical barriers, whether Nic and Lottie would agree, and whether she could tell Elfrieda about the possibility without extinguishing any hope of living. The plan remains a dilemma, not an accomplished journey. In a later conversation, Yolandi says she has looked up the cost of a Swiss clinic; her friend Julie questions whether it is meant for someone who is not already dying, while Yolandi argues that Elfrieda’s weariness of life matters. The questions remain open even after the house purchase: the money makes a home possible, but cannot establish what either sister would ultimately have chosen.

Buying a home under pressure

Yolandi’s decision to buy is shaped by urgency. She tells the real-estate agent that time is running out, despite the agent’s reluctance to show the property. The house is close to a polluted lake and sits between a funeral home, a mental hospital, and a slaughterhouse. Its condition is severe: walls and floors are damaged, stairs are broken, the roof needs replacing, and the yard is contaminated with lead. Skunks live beneath the deck, and an abandoned motor-parts factory stands across the lane. These surroundings make the purchase less a discovery of an ideal home than a wager on what the building might become.

With Lottie expected to arrive in four weeks, Yolandi organizes repairs and hires workers to make the place habitable. She has a large, bright, warm bedroom added at the back of the house for her mother. The intended future view of a garden and open sky contrasts with the wrecked yard as it exists during the renovation: the room is built around a possibility, not a claim that the surroundings have already been transformed. Meanwhile, Yolandi sleeps in the largely empty house on an air mattress and listens to Nelson, one of the workers, tell stories as he paints. Repair is practical, improvised, and unfinished; the home takes shape through cash negotiations, workers’ labor, and Yolandi’s effort to prepare it before Lottie arrives.

Lottie’s arrival and the shared household

Lottie’s first visit to the house takes place during a storm, with Nora and school friends in the car. The wind defeats Lottie’s umbrella, which she throws away, and the group watches it land in the sludge-filled moat by the factory. They laugh together before going inside, turning an unpromising first encounter with the property into a shared family memory. Nelson is still working when they arrive, putting the finishing touches on Lottie’s ceilings.

Lottie walks slowly through the house, looking closely at its features and recalling details from her childhood. She decides it has style and an odd charm, and says she can see the family living there happily. Yolandi, Nora, the girls, and Nelson respond with embraces and high-fives. Later, Lottie and Nelson talk about poetry and the power of the sea. The celebration is modest and provisional: the house is still being repaired, but Lottie’s welcome changes it from Yolandi’s risky purchase into a place the family can begin to claim together.

Shelter, autonomy, and what continues

Lottie’s move becomes a family decision rather than a matter for extended debate. When she asks whether she can come, Yolandi tells her to do so. The household will consist of Lottie, Yolandi, and Nora, living in a house Yolandi describes as an old wreck. Their arrangement is framed as a way to gather together after loss, with the practical image of dwindling supplies and an approaching winter giving their solidarity a defensive, makeshift quality. The home does not erase what has happened; it gives the three women a shared address and daily life after Elfrieda’s death.

The renovation also makes room for Lottie’s independence. She insists that the bars be removed from the ground-floor windows, rejecting the idea of living in what she regards as a prison, even though the workers worry about her safety. Before the household settles in, Yolandi climbs Nelson’s ladder and writes AMPS on a ceiling that is soon to be painted over. The mark is brief, but it brings Elfrieda’s signature symbol into the house the inheritance has helped make possible. The next morning, Yolandi and Lottie are to oversee the moving truck from Winnipeg, placing belongings in their rooms and beginning their life there. The action’s ending is not a cure or a final answer about Zurich: it is the arrival of Lottie’s things, the removal of the bars, and the decision to stay.