were late. They were going to start charging penalty. And the co-op cut overtime in April and I've been — " He stopped. "I was going to put it back. I was going to put it back by spring. I told myself it was a loan. I told myself it was fine because it was for the house and the house is his too, it's his house, it was her house. And then I had a couple hundred left, and it was getting cold, and he'd grown out of everything, and I thought — I thought, she'd want him to have a good coat. I thought, it's the one thing out of all of it I can actually say is for him."
He laughed, a short terrible laugh with no air in it.
"So I bought the coat with it. And I didn't tell anybody. And I didn't tell anybody because I didn't want anybody at that church to look at me on Sunday and know I'd gone into the dead wife's money to pay the furnace guy."
"Dad," Dell said.
"I'm sorry, bud."
"Dad, I didn't know about the furnace."
"Why would you? I didn't tell you. That was the point." His father finally looked up, and his eyes were wet, and he did not wipe them. "That was the whole point of it. Nobody was supposed to know anything. And look. Look where it got us." He looked at the hoodie lying in a heap on the floor, at the binder clips. "You've been wearing that. With clips on it. Since October."
"November," Dell said. "The zipper broke in November."
His father made a sound.
Gudrun got up off her heels and went into the kitchen. They heard her moving around in the dark, and the zip of her purse, and she came back with a small stack of papers in her hand, folded, and she sat down on the floor again, on the other side of the stove, and held them out. Not to Rasmus. To Dell.
He took them because he did not know what else to do. They were receipts. Little slips of thermal paper from the credit union in Two Harbors, the kind that come out of the machine at the counter, and they said DEPOSIT across the top, and the account number ending in 4417, and the dates. October 30. November 13. November 27. December 11. One hundred and fifty dollars. One hundred and fifty dollars. Two hundred. One hundred and fifty.
"Six fifty," Gudrun said. "So far. I picked up the Sunday doubles. Anybody can put money into an account. You only need the custodian to take it out."