unspoken agreement never to discuss each other's parents. Pekka still did not talk much. But he had shown Dell how to cast with a spinning reel without tangling it, and once, the spring before, when two eighth graders had taken Dell's backpack and thrown it onto the roof of the bus garage, Pekka had climbed the drainpipe and gotten it down and handed it to him and walked off without a word, and the eighth graders had not done it again.
Gudrun worked at the Birchwood, which was the care home down the shore in Silver Bay. She was a nursing assistant on the night shift, which meant that she left the house at six in the evening and came back at seven-thirty in the morning, and that she slept most of the day with a fan going for the noise and a towel stuffed along the bottom of the bedroom door. She was a square, tired woman with strong forearms and reading glasses she wore on a cord around her neck, and she had a way of doing things very fast, without wasting anything, that Dell had first thought was anger and later understood was just how a person moves when she has been doing hard work for twenty years on not enough sleep.
She was not unkind to him. That was the thing that he would have trouble explaining afterward, to the school counselor and to his aunt in Minneapolis and, years later, to a girl he was serious about, who would ask him why he still went quiet in a certain way when a woman's voice went flat. Gudrun was not unkind. She packed his lunch when she packed Pekka's. She signed his permission slips. She had sat up with him the whole night in March when he had the stomach flu, holding his forehead over the toilet with one big cool hand, and in the morning she had gone straight to her shift without sleeping. She did not hug him, and she did not tell him she loved him, and he did not tell her so either, and both of them had seemed to agree that this was the honest way to do it.
But something had changed in October. And by the week of the ice storm, the house had a cold place in it that had nothing to do with the weather.
The storm had been coming for three days. Everybody knew. The weather radio on the shelf above the kitchen sink had been saying it in its flat robot voice, ice storm warning in effect, significant ice accumulations of one half inch to one inch, power outages and tree damage likely, travel strongly discouraged. Dell's father had been home exactly once in those three days, for four hours on Tuesday afternoon, during which he slept on the couch in his clothes with his boots still on and his phone on his