"Okay," his father said. "Okay." He started to zip up the tan coat. Then he stopped, and looked down at it, and then got up and went out into the mudroom, and they heard him rummaging, the scrape of hangers on the rod, and then the side door to the garage opening and shutting, and the bang of something being knocked over out there in the dark, and a word he did not usually say in the house. When he came back he was carrying another coat.
It was the old one. Dell knew it instantly. It was the coat his father had worn before the co-op switched to the new arc-rated ones, six or seven years ago, the same tan canvas but faded almost to white at the shoulders, with the old orange reflective tape instead of the silver, cracked and peeling. The corduroy collar was worn through in one place to the threads. It had been hanging in the garage on a nail behind the chest freezer for years. Dell had forgotten it was there. It smelled like the garage, like dust and mice and old gasoline, and under that, faintly, still, like his father.
His father held it out.
"It's not new," he said. "It's not anything. But it's warm, and it's not from any fund, and nobody's going to be mad if you throw it in a river." He tried to smile and did not quite manage it. "Please don't throw it in a river."
Dell took it. It was heavy. It was so much heavier than the green coat had been. He stood up, wobbling, with the wool blanket falling off his shoulders, and his father helped him get his arms into it, and it came down past his knees and the sleeves hung a foot past his hands, and his father knelt and rolled them up, one cuff and then the other, three turns each, the way he rolled his own sleeves at the sink in summer.
"Your mom used to catch you in this," his father said, not looking up. "You remember that? You'd be in the mudroom in it."
"I remember."
"She'd laugh so hard she had to sit down."
"I remember, Dad."
His father finished the second cuff and held on to it for a second longer than he needed to. Then he stood up.
Pekka had not moved from the window. Now he unfolded his arms and went to the couch, and picked up the black coat from where it had been lying all evening, and held it out to Dell too, awkwardly, at arm's length, the way you would hand somebody something hot.
"You can have this," he said. "If you want. I don't want it."