His father was a lineman. That meant that when the power went out anywhere between Two Harbors and the Canadian border, Rasmus Aune was one of the people who went out into it. He had been doing it since before Dell was born. He had a bucket truck with the co-op's logo on the door, a green arrowhead and the words NORTH SHORE COOPERATIVE POWER, and a set of climbing hooks that hung in the garage, and a coat.
The coat was the thing Dell thought about most that winter, later. It was a heavy tan canvas work coat, flame resistant, with a quilted lining and a corduroy collar gone dark with years of his father's neck. It had reflective stripes across the back and around the arms, silver tape that lit up white in headlights. It smelled like diesel and two-cycle oil and coffee and something underneath that was just his father. When Dell was small he used to put it on in the mudroom when nobody was watching, and it hung to his ankles, and he would walk around in it with the sleeves dragging, and once his mother had caught him and laughed so hard she had to sit down on the bench.
His mother had been gone for four years. She had died of something in her blood that took eleven months, in the spring Dell was seven, and she was the one he remembered when he thought of the word laugh. Her name had been Freya. There was a picture of her on the refrigerator, held up with a magnet shaped like a walleye, in which she was standing on the rocks at Split Rock in a red hat squinting at whoever held the camera. Dell thought it was probably his father who held it. He had never asked.
Two years after his mother died, his father had married Gudrun.
Gudrun had come with a son, Pekka, who was four years older than Dell and had been, at first, the most frightening person Dell had ever met. Pekka was tall and pale with white-blond hair that he wore too long, and he did not talk. That was what frightened Dell. Every other person he had ever met talked to children, asked them questions, what grade are you in, do you like hockey. Pekka looked at him the way you look at a dog you are not sure about and went into the room that used to be the sewing room and shut the door.
That had been two years ago. Now Pekka was fifteen and Dell was eleven and they had worked out the kind of arrangement that brothers who are not quite brothers work out, which was mostly a matter of who got the bathroom first and an