"What I said out there," she said. "To Tove. I'm not going to tell you I didn't mean it, because some part of me did, at the end of a day like this one. But it wasn't true. You're not mine, that part's true. But the rest of it. Let him freeze. That wasn't true. I don't want that. I've never wanted that, Dell, not one day. I'm sorry you heard it. I'm sorry I said it. I'm sorry I left it this long."
Dell looked down at the receipts in his hand. One hundred and fifty. Two hundred. He thought about her driving to Two Harbors on her days off, standing at the counter in the credit union in her parka with the cash in an envelope, saying the account number. He thought about her doing it four times and never saying a word. He thought about the hand on his forehead in March, over the toilet, cool and steady.
He did not know what to say. So he said, "I'm sorry I lied about the bus."
"I know you are."
"I'm sorry I threw it in the river." His voice wobbled. "It was really light. It floated for a long time."
Gudrun closed her eyes. When she opened them again she was almost smiling, a small crooked unhappy smile. "They're full of air," she said. "The good ones. That's how they work."
His father let out a long breath, and put Dell's feet down gently on the blanket, and tucked the blanket around them, and then sat there with his hands on his knees looking at the three of them, the wife and the stepson and the son, as if he had just walked into the room and was trying to work out whose house it was.
"I don't know how to fix this," he said.
"You don't have to fix it tonight," Gudrun said. "You have to go back down the hill. Kolstad's going to come up here with a flashlight."
"I'm not going back down the hill."
"Yes, you are. There's four hundred houses on that feeder and one of them is the Kestis' and Bonnie Kesti's on oxygen." She said it flatly. "Dell's okay. He's warm now. I've got him. Go."
His father looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Dell, and Dell nodded, because she was right, he could feel his feet again and they hurt like crazy, which meant they were fine, and because Lasse's grandmother was on oxygen and he knew that, everybody on Larch Hill knew that.