Dell looked at the black coat, and at Pekka, and at the packing slip still sticking out of Pekka's pocket that said Happy birthday four months late. He thought about the reel with its bent bail on the shelf in Pekka's room. He thought about what he had said in the kitchen in October, it's not like your dad's ever coming to see you use it, and how Pekka's face had gone still like the lake before the wind.
"It's yours," he said. "It's way too big for me anyway."
"It's too big for me too."
"You'll grow into it. You grew four inches."
Pekka almost laughed. It came out his nose. "Mom tell you that?"
"I heard her on the phone."
Pekka looked down at the coat in his hands for a while. Then, without saying anything else, he put it on. He did it fast, like it might hurt less that way, both arms and then the zipper, all the way to his chin, and he stood there in the middle of the living room in the lantern light in a three-hundred-dollar coat from a man who did not visit, and his face did nothing, and then it did something, and he turned around and went back to the window.
"I'll fix your reel," Dell said to his back. "I'll pay for it. I'll find a way."
"It's fine," Pekka said to the glass. "I never used it."
"I know. But I'll fix it."
Pekka was quiet for a while. "Okay," he said.
His father put his hard hat back on. At the door he turned around and looked at all three of them again, and he seemed about to say something, a big thing, and then he didn't. He said, "Keep the screen in front of the stove."
"We know," Gudrun said.
"I know you know." And he went out, and the cold came in under the door and was gone, and they heard his boots on the porch steps and then nothing.
It was a little after three in the morning when the power came back.
Dell was awake for it. He had been lying on the floor by the stove in the old canvas coat with the afghan over his legs, not sleeping, listening to Gudrun breathe on the couch and Pekka breathe on the other side of the coffee table, where he had fallen asleep sitting up against the armchair still zipped into the black coat with his chin down inside the collar. The ice had stopped. The ticking in the trees had slowed, the way it does when the temperature finally starts to lift a degree or two, to a few small sounds, far apart.
And then the furnace came on.
It was the first thing. A click somewhere deep under the floor and then the rumble and the whoosh of the burner catching and the long low breath of the blower, and the refrigerator shuddering awake in the kitchen, and the clock on the microwave