"Is that from your dad?" Dell said, before he could stop himself.
Pekka folded the slip back up and put it in his pocket. "Yeah," he said.
"Nice of him," Gudrun said from the kitchen doorway. Her voice was careful. "Try it on."
Pekka did not try it on. He lifted the coat out of the box and laid it across the arm of the couch and sat back down on the floor and picked up his phone again. Gudrun stood in the doorway for a moment longer, looking at the coat, then at her son, then at Dell in his hoodie with the clips. Dell thought she was going to say something. He did not know what he wanted her to say. Then she turned and went back into the dark kitchen, and he heard her moving around in there, opening the cupboards by feel.
The coat lay on the arm of the couch all evening, black and new, catching the lantern light along its zipper. Dell kept not looking at it. It was so close he could have reached out and touched the sleeve.
At around seven the ice started again. You could hear it, a fine hissing against the windows, and then the ticking in the trees, and then, every so often, the long crack and crash. Once something hit the roof hard enough that all three of them looked up at the ceiling, and Gudrun said, "Branch," and nobody said anything else. The temperature in the living room had dropped to fifty-one. The thermometer on the wall by the stove said so. Gudrun went out to the porch twice to try to get enough signal to call the Birchwood, because inside the house the phones showed nothing, and each time she came back in with ice in her hair and her mouth set.
"Lines are down at the bottom of the hill," she said the second time. "I can see a truck down there. Couple of trucks. Lights going."
Dell went to the window. Down at the bottom of Larch Hill, where the road came off the county highway, there were lights, amber flashers turning slowly in the dark, and a white work light on a tall boom, and in the glare of the white light he could see the black shapes of trees bent all the way over, and a pole leaning at an angle that poles were not supposed to lean at. He looked for a long time. He could not tell whose truck it was. There were a lot of trucks up and down the shore that week, from Minnesota Power and from the co-op and from outfits in Wisconsin and Iowa and North Dakota, convoys of white bucket trucks rolling up Highway 61 in the dark.