He found it near the bottom. A statement from the credit union, folded in thirds, for an account ending in 4417, and on the second page, under the heading WITHDRAWALS, there was a line that said 09/22 and a number that said 2,200.00.
Two thousand two hundred dollars. On the twenty-second of September. Two days later, his father had come home with the green coat in a bag from the big sporting goods store in Duluth, and handed it to him, and said, "Try it on, bud, let's see," and stood in the kitchen with his arms crossed smiling a tired smile while Dell zipped it up to his chin.
Dell did not know, then, what else two thousand two hundred dollars had bought. He did not think about the furnace that had gone out in August and been repaired, or the truck payment, or the property tax bill that had sat on the fridge under the walleye magnet all summer next to his mother's picture. He did not know that the co-op had cut overtime across the board in the spring after a bad year, or that his father had been working his regular forty and then driving down to Duluth two nights a week to pull wire for an electrician friend for cash, or that the cash had not been enough. He was ten. He knew about the coat. He looked at the number and he looked at the coat, which was hanging on the back of his own door, green and puffy and warm, with its fake-fur hood, and he understood that he had been wearing his mother.
He did not cry. He had thought he would, but he didn't. He went and got the coat off the hook and put it on and went out of the house and down the hill in the dark, past the mailbox, past the Kestis' place with its blue porch light, all the way down to the bridge where Larch Hill Road crossed the Ashlar River. The river was high and fast with October rain. He could hear it before he saw it. He stood on the bridge in the coat for a long time with the cold coming up off the water, and then he took it off and held it out over the railing at arm's length, and it was so light, that was the thing, it was so much lighter than it should have been for what it cost, and he let it go.