He sat down on the floor by the stove, across from Pekka, and put another split of birch on the coals, and watched the bark curl and catch.
"What," Pekka said, without looking up from his phone.
"Nothing."
Pekka looked up. His eyes went to the box in the mudroom and then back to Dell, and then he looked down at his phone again, and his jaw did something, a small tightening at the hinge, and Dell thought, he knows. He knows what's in it and he knows what I'm thinking about it.
Dell did not know, then, that Pekka knew a great deal more than that.
The green coat had started with a fight about a fishing reel.
That was the stupid part, the part Dell kept coming back to afterward, turning it over the way you turn over a rock to see what lives under it. It had not started with anything important. It had started on a Saturday at the beginning of October, a bright cold blue day with the birches all gone yellow on the hill, when Dell had taken Pekka's good reel down to the river without asking.
It was a Shimano, silver and black, and Pekka's father had sent it from Thunder Bay for his fourteenth birthday in a box with no card. Pekka never used it. He used the old Zebco that had been in the garage when he moved in, which had been Dell's mother's, which Dell's father had told him he could have. The Shimano sat on the shelf in Pekka's room in its box. Dell had looked at it a hundred times through the open door. On that Saturday Pekka was at a friend's in Two Harbors, and Dell had gone in and taken the reel off the shelf and put it on his own rod and walked down the hill to the river to fish for brook trout below the bridge.
He had dropped it on the rocks. Not hard. But the bail had bent, and when he tried to bend it back it bent worse, and when Pekka came home that evening and found it on the shelf back in its box with the bail crooked like a broken finger, he had come down the stairs faster than Dell had ever seen him move.
Dell had said he was sorry. He had said it about six times. And Pekka, who did not talk, had stood in the kitchen doorway and said more words in a row than Dell had heard from him in two years, and most of them were not words Gudrun allowed in the house, and Dell, who was ten then, eleven in two weeks, scared and ashamed and cornered, had said the worst thing he could think of.