The zipper on Dell's hoodie had given out on the second Monday in November, and by the week of the ice storm he had figured out how to live with it.
It was a gray hoodie, a size too big when his father bought it at the Fleet Farm in Cloquet the August before, so that the sleeves came down over his knuckles and he could pull them over his hands like mittens. The zipper had always been a little cheap. The pull tab was plastic, and the teeth were plastic, and one cold morning at the bus stop the slider had come off the bottom of the track entirely and would not go back on no matter how he pinched it. After that the two halves of the hoodie just hung open, and the wind off Lake Superior came straight through his T-shirt like it had been waiting all year for the chance.
He fixed it with a binder clip. He took a big black one from the junk drawer in the kitchen, the kind with the silver wire handles that fold back, and he clamped the two sides of the hoodie together at the middle of his chest. When the wind was bad he used two. When it was very bad he used three and walked with his arms crossed over them so the gaps between the clips would not open, and he looked, he knew, like somebody holding a package to his chest that he did not want anyone to see.
Nobody at the bus stop said anything. There were four kids at the stop at the bottom of Larch Hill Road, and it was eleven below some mornings, and everybody was too busy stamping their feet to look at anybody else. Lasse Kesti, who was in sixth grade with him, looked once at the binder clips and then looked away, which Dell thought was decent of him.
The town was called Ashlar, and it sat on the North Shore about forty minutes up from Duluth, which meant that it was the kind of place where people said "up the shore" and "down the shore" instead of north and south, and where every winter somebody's truck went through the ice on a lake that everybody had said was fine. There was a gas station, a Lutheran church, a Catholic church, a bar called the Breakwater, a school that went kindergarten through twelfth grade in one long brick building, and the electric co-op yard, where Dell's father worked.