starting to blink 12:00, 12:00, 12:00, green in the dark. Out in the hall the nightlight came on. Through the window, down the hill and all along it, one by one, the lights of the other houses were coming back, the Kestis' blue porch light first, then the others, little yellow squares in the black, like somebody walking down a long row lighting candles.
Gudrun sat up on the couch. She looked at the window, and at the blinking microwave, and then over at Dell, and their eyes met in the green light.
"That's him," she said. "That's his crew."
"I know."
She lay back down. After a while she said, without turning her head, "There's a store in Duluth. Saturday, if the roads are open. If you want. We could go look. Just look."
Dell thought about it. He thought about the receipts, which he had put in the inside pocket of his father's coat, where they crackled when he moved. He thought about the number at the bottom of the last one and the number that was still missing and how long it would take to put it back, at a hundred and fifty every two weeks, and about whether a coat from a store in Duluth would be warm or would just be something everybody could see.
He did not know yet. He would not know for a while. There were a lot of things he did not know yet: whether he was going to stop going quiet when her voice went flat, and whether his father was going to tell Pastor Brodahl about the fund or carry it by himself, and whether the three of them, four of them, could talk to each other in daylight the way they had talked by the stove, or whether it only worked in the dark. Whether the green coat had gone all the way out into the lake, or whether it was caught somewhere down there in the alders below the bridge, waiting for the spring melt to bring it up.
"Maybe," he said. "I'll think about it."
"Okay," Gudrun said. "Think about it."
He pulled the collar of his father's coat up over his ears. The corduroy was rough against his cheek where it had worn through. Somewhere down the hill, under a white work light, a man he could not see was lowering himself in a bucket from the top of a new pole, and Dell lay in the warming house and listened to the furnace breathing, and did not sleep, and did not mind.