hill he could see a man go up in a bucket, a small dark figure in the white glare, and he watched the bucket rise along the leaning pole and stop, and he thought about his father's hands, the big cracked knuckles, the way they looked in the summer when he came home and washed at the kitchen sink and the water ran off them gray.
He was very cold. He knew he was very cold. It was the kind of cold that is past hurting, where your feet and hands start to feel like they belong to somebody else and your thoughts get slow and simple. He thought, I will go in in a minute. He thought it several times.
The front door opened.
He heard it before he saw anything, the creak and the suck of the storm door and then the wooden door, and the brief warm smell of woodsmoke from inside, and then the doors closing again. It was Gudrun. He could tell by her steps, which were heavy and fast. She went to the south end of the porch, the far end, where the signal was best, and he heard the little three-note chime of her phone coming awake and then the ringing on speaker, tinny in the cold, and then a woman's voice.
"Gudy? Oh my God, are you okay? I've been calling all day."
It was Tove, Gudrun's younger sister, who lived in St. Paul and was a dental hygienist and talked very fast. Dell had met her at the wedding and twice at Thanksgiving. She had given him a twenty-dollar bill in a card both times, and both times she had hugged him too hard and said into his hair, "You are just the sweetest thing," in a voice that made him want to disappear.
"We're fine," Gudrun said. "Power's out. We've got the stove. I've only got a few percent, I just wanted you to know we're okay."
"Is Rasmus there?"
"No. He's out. He'll be out all week."
"Oh, Gudy."
"It's his job. It's fine."
"Is it fine? Is it really? Because you sound — "
"Tove." A pause. Dell heard Gudrun's boots shift on the boards. "I don't have the battery for this."
"Did the coat come? For Pekka?"
"It came. His father sent it. Came to the Birchwood."
"Well, that's something. That's — did he like it?"
"He didn't put it on." Another pause. Then Gudrun said, in a voice Dell had never heard from her, a low ragged voice that sounded like it had come up from a long way down, "He just looked at the slip and put it in his pocket. You know what it said? It said 'Happy birthday.' His birthday was in August, Tove. It's December."
"Oh, honey."