Fair Enough

The sign said HEIRS HOME SERVICES in green letters on white plastic, and it had been hanging above our shop in the Dorado Court plaza since 1996, which made it the longest-surviving thing in the plaza besides the cockroaches and Mrs. Josephs, who ran the roti place next door and was, by general consensus, somewhere between seventy-nine and eternal.

My name is Howard Heirs. I fix things for a living. Furnaces, mostly. Also air conditioners, washing machines, dryers, hot water heaters, and the occasional dishwasher — the essential machines, the ones that keep a house from becoming a building. I do this in Scarborough, Ontario, which is the part of Toronto that Toronto pretends is somewhere else. If you've heard of Scarborough, it's because of Drake, or a stabbing, or because someone on Reddit called it "the Scarbs" and four hundred people showed up in the comments to either defend it with their lives or call it a wasteland, and both sides were correct, and the thread got locked within the hour.

I won't bore you with a full description of the place. Not yet. Here's the minimum viable Scarborough: it's where Toronto keeps the people who make Toronto work. The truckers and the nurses and the warehouse staff and the plumbers and the women who clean the offices on Bay Street and take the 54 Lawrence East home at night, past the strip malls and the plazas and the bungalows with the Christmas lights still up in March because nobody's had the time or the ladder. The city needs these people the way a body needs kidneys — urgently, constantly, without thinking about it, and with absolutely no plans to send a thank-you card.

Scarborough is flat. Not pancake-flat like the prairies — rolling-flat, the kind of flat where the sky is the tallest thing and the buildings know their place. The plazas sit low on the corners. Strip malls, mostly. L-shaped or U-shaped, with parking lots that are too big for the businesses they serve and too small for the condos they'll become.

The city did promise us a subway once. Then again. Then again. If you're counting, that's roughly once per election cycle since I was in diapers. There's a joke in Scarborough that the subway is our Santa Claus: the children believe in it, the adults pretend to, and it never actually shows up. Of course, the subway is technically a state issue now, which is a sentence that still sounds wrong no matter how many times you say it. Ontario became the 51st state in 2031. Or the 51st and 52nd, if you count the brief, deeply Canadian suggestion that we split into two states — one for Toronto, one for everyone else — which was rejected by Washington on the grounds that "we already have enough of that." The merger, the annexation, the integration, the thing — nobody has settled on a word for it, which tells you everything. If it had been a good idea, we'd have named it by now. The flag has a new star. The money changed. The healthcare is still being "transitioned," which is the word governments use when they mean "dismantled but slowly enough that you can't point to the exact day it happened." Tim Hortons took the American flag decal off within a week. Then corporate put it back. Then someone in Scarborough peeled it off again. This went on for a while. A state representative appeared at the plaza once to announce a "transit study." She had a photographer and a pair of jeans so new they still had the fold lines. She ate a doubles at Island Pot, posted the photo to Instagram, and called Scarborough "vibrant and resilient," which is what politicians call neighbourhoods they've decided to admire from a safe distance. Before the merger she'd been a councillor. Now she was a state rep, which meant the same job with a different business card and the ability to say "as a proud Ontarian and American" at ribbon cuttings. She did not look at the seven empty storefronts with their soaped-over windows. Nobody asked her to. We're well-trained.

But I'm ahead of myself.

My parents were Clifford and Agnes Heirs. Between them they inherited almost nothing, which makes the surname aspirational fiction, like naming a sinking boat Prosperity.

Clifford came from Manchester, England, in 1991. Specifically: from a heating systems factory that closed and a marriage that didn't survive the factory closing, which was the standard Manchester sequence in the Thatcher aftermath. He landed in Toronto with a trade certificate in HVAC repair and a suitcase that was mostly wrenches. Agnes came from Sarajevo in 1993 for reasons that should be obvious and terrible. She arrived by way of a refugee camp in Germany and an uncle's pullout couch in Mississauga. They met at a Tim Hortons, because this is Canada and that is where the important things happen. He was fixing the heating unit. She was on the register. He told her the vent above the fryer was going to fail. She said she'd stopped hearing it months ago.

He was talking about the vent. He was also, without knowing it, delivering a concise summary of the next forty years of Canadian economic policy.

They got married. They opened the shop. My father made the sign himself — green and white, the cheapest combination at the sign place on Markham Road. He hung it in the Dorado Court plaza between Island Pot (Jamaican roti, indestructible) and a tax preparer called Tax Palace (taxes, presumably — it's an Amazon locker now). They fixed things. The neighbourhood needed things fixed. Everything was always a little broken, which was fine, because broken was the business model.

Here is a partial list of things that were true about Scarborough when my parents opened the shop:

• A bungalow cost $180,000.
• The plazas were full.
• You could raise a family on one trade income and have money left over to take the kids to Wasaga Beach in August.
• The bus came every twelve minutes.
• The community centre pool was open seven days a week.
• Nobody had heard of the gig economy, because the regular economy still worked.

Here's what's true now:

• The bungalow costs $1.1 million. The bungalow has not improved. The bungalow has, if anything, gotten worse.
• Seven of twelve units in the plaza are empty, windows soaped white — the Scarborough funeral rite for dead businesses.
• You can raise a family on one trade income if "raise" means "keep alive" and you don't look at what "alive" requires.
• The bus comes when it comes. There is an app that tells you when, and the app is wrong, but at least you have something to stare at while you wait.
• The pool is closed for the season. The season is permanent. The sign hasn't been updated. In Scarborough, we leave the wrong signs up. It's easier than explaining what happened.
• The gig economy is just the economy. The regular economy is something your parents describe like a dead relative — warmly, vaguely, and only after a couple of beers.
• You are technically an American, which you did not vote for, because the referendum was held during a period when everyone was too busy losing their jobs to notice they were also losing their country. The phrase "as a Canadian" now requires a footnote. The footnote is longer than the sentence.

I was born in 1998, above the shop. Grew up in Scarborough. Dropped out of U of T Scarborough after two years — the satellite campus, the other one, the one downtown kids call "UTSC" the way you'd name a lesser moon — and came back to help my father, who had a stroke in 2019 and needed me more than the philosophy department did. He taught me the trade the way he'd learned it in Manchester: hands on the machine, ear to the metal, respect for the system you're working on because someone smarter than you designed it, even if the execution was shoddy.

Clifford died in 2024. Heart attack, not the stroke they'd been watching. That's maintenance for you — the catastrophic failure is never the one you're monitoring. Agnes died in 2027, in her sleep, in the apartment above the shop. She looked annoyed about it, which tracked.

This left me — thirty, alone, running a business that was less a business and more an elaborate manifestation of grief that happened to occasionally fix someone's furnace.

Then I built the System.

I should capitalize that. The System. Capital S. You give the big things names so you can talk about them without screaming.

I'm not a programmer. I'm a furnace guy who turned out to be very good at describing problems to AI tools, which is, it turns out, the only skill the new economy actually values: the ability to tell a machine what you need in language it can a