He had said, "Who cares. It's not like your dad's ever coming to see you use it."
He remembered how Pekka's face had changed. It had not gone angry. It had gone very still, the way the lake goes still right before the wind comes over it.
Gudrun was asleep upstairs. Dell's father was at the yard. It was just the two of them in the kitchen, and the light was going orange across the linoleum, and Pekka had looked at him for a while and then said, in a quiet, almost friendly voice, "At least I don't walk around in a coat bought with my dead mom's money."
Dell had not understood. He had said, "What?"
"Your new coat," Pekka said. "Where do you think it came from? Your dad took it out of the fund. The church fund. I saw the paper on his desk." And then, maybe because Dell's face had done something that frightened him, maybe because he was already sorry, Pekka had turned around and gone back up the stairs and shut his door, and that was the end of the conversation, and neither of them had ever said a word about it again.
The fund. Dell knew about the fund the way you know about something that is always there and never looked at, like the furnace or the foundation of a house. When his mother died, the Lutheran church had taken up a collection, and then the co-op had matched it, and then there had been a spaghetti supper at the Legion hall and a raffle for a quilt and a chainsaw, and at the end of it there had been a little more than eleven thousand dollars, and it had gone into an account at the credit union in Two Harbors with Dell's name on it and his father's name as the custodian. It was for college, people said. It was for Dell's future. He had heard a woman at the funeral lunch say "so the boy has something of her," and he had not known what she meant, and he had thought about it for years.
So the boy has something of her.
He had gone into his father's room that same night, while his father was still at the yard and Gudrun had left for her shift and Pekka's door was shut. His father's desk was an old oak teacher's desk by the window, and on it, under a coffee can full of pens and a broken headlamp, there was a stack of mail. Dell had gone through it with his heart pounding. He was not supposed to. He knew that.