"Four months. It's a three-hundred-dollar coat and it's four months late and it's the only thing that man has sent in a year, and I'm supposed to stand there and say, oh, isn't that nice. And I did. I said isn't that nice."
"You did the right thing."
"I don't know what the right thing is anymore." There was a sound that might have been a laugh. "I really don't."
Dell sat very still behind the woodbox. He had forgotten, for a moment, how cold he was.
"And what about the other one?" Tove said. "Did you get him something? Because you said last time — "
"No."
"Gudy."
"No. I didn't." Something in Gudrun's voice went hard and flat, the way it did when a resident at the Birchwood was being difficult and she had decided not to take it, and Dell had heard her do that voice on the phone to her supervisor once and been glad it wasn't for him. "And I'm not going to. I told you. He threw a coat in the river, Tove. A brand-new coat. Two hundred and some dollars, and he walked down to that bridge and threw it in the river and came home and looked me in the face and lied about it."
"He's eleven."
"I know how old he is." The wind came across the porch and Dell heard her turn her back to it. "You know what, he can sit out in that rag with the clips on it until he figures out what a coat costs. Let him freeze a little. I'm done. He's not mine, Tove. I don't get to make him sorry. I just get to pay for it."
There was a silence on the phone, a crackling silence. Then Tove said something, but Dell did not hear what it was, because another voice came out of the dark at the bottom of the porch steps, out of the yard, out of the glittering black where there was nobody, where there could not possibly be anybody, and the voice said:
"What did you just say?"
Rasmus Aune had been standing in his own front yard for almost two minutes.
He had not meant to stand there. He had meant to walk straight up and in. Kolstad, the crew foreman, had looked at him at a quarter past eight, down at the bottom of the hill under the work lights, and seen something in his face, and said, "Your place is right up there, isn't it?" and Rasmus had said yes, and Kolstad had said, "We're waiting on the Iowa guys for the new pole anyway. Go check your stove. Twenty minutes. Don't make me come get you."
It was the first time he had been off a truck in thirty-one hours.