address for things she did not want sitting in a snowbank. Dell looked at the box for a long time, while the stove ticked and Gudrun breathed and Pekka sat cross-legged on the floor with his phone, which still had forty percent and which he was rationing like a man in a lifeboat rationing water.
He did not open the box. He did not have to. He could read the label from where he stood. It said the name of the company, which was a big outdoor company whose logo was a mountain, and it said, in the line for the recipient, PEKKA HALME, c/o BIRCHWOOD CARE CENTER.
Halme was Pekka's last name, from his father. Pekka's father lived in Thunder Bay, across the Canadian border, and Dell had met him once, a big quiet man with Pekka's same pale hair, who came down for an afternoon the first summer and took Pekka out on the lake in a borrowed boat and brought him back four hours later sunburned and silent.
Dell knew what was in the box. It was a coat. He had heard Gudrun say the word on the phone, two weeks before, standing in the kitchen in the afternoon thinking he was upstairs. He had heard her say, "Well, he needs one, he's grown four inches since last winter," and then, "No, I'll handle it," and then, in a different voice, lower, "I'm not getting into that with you again, Tove, I'm not. He had a coat."
He had a coat. That was what she said. Dell had stood on the stairs with his hand on the railing and felt the words go into him like cold water.
He had had a coat. It had been green, a good puffy green coat with a hood lined in some kind of fake fur, and it had cost a lot of money, more than any coat he had ever owned, and he had had it for exactly nineteen days in October before it went off the bridge over the Ashlar River and down into the brown water and was gone.
He had told them he lost it. He had said he left it on the bus. Gudrun had called the bus garage, and the school lost and found, and the bus driver, Mr. Norquist, at his house, and nobody had it, and she had stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand and looked at Dell for a very long time without saying anything at all. Then she had said, "Okay," in a voice like a door closing, and she had not mentioned the coat again. Not to him. Not, he was fairly sure, to his father.
And then the zipper on the hoodie had broken, and she had looked at that too, and said nothing, and a week later he had heard her on the phone say he had a coat.