On the last weekend of Advent, when eighty or a hundred tins had been lined with waxed paper and packed with fudge and toffee and garnished with Jordan almonds, Gene and Dorothy and Walter went out giving. It took the entire weekend, often longer. Walter’s older brother, Mitch, stayed behind at the motel with Brent, who, although he later became an Air Force pilot, as a child was easily made carsick. The candy went first to Gene’s many friends in Hibbing and then, with much backtracking and dead-ending, to farther-flung friends and relatives, down through the Iron Range to Grand Rapids and beyond. It was unthinkable not to accept coffee or a cookie at every house. Between stops, Walter sat in the back seat with a book, watching a feeble window-shaped patch of sunlight hold steady on the seat and then, when a right-angle turn was finally reached, slide across the canyon of the floor and reappear, in twisted form, on the back of the front seat. Outside were the eternal paltry wood lots, the eternal snowed-over bog, the circular tin fertilizer advertisements tacked to telephone poles, the furled hawks and bold ravens. On the seat beside him was the growing pile of packages from homes already visited-Scandinavian baked goods, Finnish and Croatian delicacies, bottles of “cheer” from Gene’s unmarried friends-and the slowly dwindling pile of Berglund tins. These tins’ chief merit was that they contained the same candy that Gene and Dorothy had been giving since they were married. The candy had gradually morphed, over the years, from a treat into a reminder of treats past. It was the annual gift the poor Berglunds could still be wealthy in.

Walter was finishing his junior year in high school when Dorothy’s father died and left her the little lakeside house in which she’d spent her girlhood summers. In Walter’s mind, the house was associated with his mother’s disabilities, because it was here, as a girl, that she’d spent long months battling the arthritis that had withered her right hand and deformed her pelvis. On a low shelf by the fireplace were the sad old “toys” with which she’d once “played” for hours-a nutcracker-like device with steel springs, a five-valved wooden trumpet-to try to preserve and increase mobility in her ravaged finger joints. The Berglunds had always been too busy with the motel to stay long at the little house, but Dorothy was fond of it, had dreams of retiring there with Gene if they could ever get rid of the motel, and so did not immediately assent when Gene proposed selling it. Gene’s health was bad, the motel was mortgaged to the hilt, and whatever small curb appeal it had once possessed was now fully eroded by the harsh Hibbing winters. Though Mitch was out of school and working as an auto-body detailer and still living at home, he blew his paychecks on girls, drink, guns, fishing equipment, and his souped-up Thunderbird. Gene might have felt differently about the house if its little unnamed lake had had fish in it more worth catching than sunnies and perch, but, since it didn’t, he didn’t see the point of holding on to a vacation home they wouldn’t have time to use anyway. Dorothy, normally the paragon of resigned pragmatism, became so sad that she went to bed for several days, complaining of a headache. And Walter, who was willing to suffer himself but couldn’t stand to see her suffering, intervened.

“I can stay in the house myself and fix it up this summer, and maybe we can start renting it out,” he told his parents.

“We need you helping here,” Dorothy said.

“I’m only here for another year anyway. What are you going to do when I’m gone?”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Gene said.

“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to hire somebody.”

“That’s why we need to sell the house,” Gene said.

“He’s right, Walter,” Dorothy said. “I hate to see the house go, but he’s right.”

“Well, what about Mitch, though? He could at least pay some rent, and you could hire somebody with that.”

“He’s on his own now,” Gene said.

“Mom still cooks for him and does his laundry! Why isn’t he at least paying rent?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“It’s Mom’s business! You’d rather sell Mom’s house than make Mitch grow up!”

“That’s his room, and I’m not going to throw him out of it.”

“Do you really think we could rent the house?” Dorothy said hopefully.

“We’d be cleaning it every week and doing laundry,” Gene said. “There’d be no end to it.”

“I could drive down once a week,” Dorothy said. “It wouldn’t be so bad.”

“We need the money now,” Gene said.

“And what if I do what Mitch does?” Walter said. “What if I just say no? What if I just go over to the house this summer and fix it up?”

“You’re not Jesus Christ,” Gene said. “We can get along here without you.”

“Gene, we can at least try to rent the house next summer. If it doesn’t work out, we can always sell it.”

“I’ll go there on weekends,” Walter said. “How about that? Mitch can take over for me on the weekends, can’t he?”

“If you want to try selling Mitch on that, go ahead,” Gene said.

“I’m not his parent!”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Gene said, and retreated to the lounge.

Why Gene gave Mitch a free pass was clear enough: he saw in his oldest son a nearly exact replica of himself, and he didn’t want to ride him the way he’d once been ridden by Einar. But Dorothy’s timidness with Mitch was more mysterious to Walter. Maybe she was already so worn out by her husband that she just didn’t have the strength or the heart to battle her son as well, or maybe she could already see Mitch’s failed future and wanted him to enjoy a few more years of kindness at home before the world had its tough way with him. In any case, it fell to Walter to knock on Mitch’s door, which was plastered with STP and Pennzoil stickers, and try to be a parent to his older brother.

Mitch was lying on his bed, smoking a cigarette and listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive on the stereo he’d bought with his bodyshop earnings. The refractory way he smiled at Walter was similar to their father’s, but more sneering. “What do you want?”

“I want you to start paying rent here, or do some work around here, or else get out.”

“Since when are you the boss?”

“Dad said I should talk to you.”

“Tell him to talk to me himself.”

“Mom doesn’t want to sell the lake house, so something’s got to change.”

“That’s her problem.”

“Jesus, Mitch. You are the most selfish person I’ve ever met.”

“Yeah, right. You’re going to go away to Harvard or wherever, and I’m going to end up taking care of this place. But I’m the selfish one.”

“You are!”

“I’m trying to save up some money in case Brenda and I need it, but I’m the selfish one.”

Brenda was the very pretty girl whose parents had practically disowned her for dating Mitch. “What exactly is your great savings plan?” Walter said. “Buying yourself a lot of stuff now that you can pawn later?”

“I work hard. What am I supposed to do, never buy anything?”

“I work hard, too, and I don’t have stuff, because I don’t get paid.”

“What about that movie camera?”

“That’s on loan from school, moron. It’s not mine.”

“Well, nobody’s loaning me any stuff, because I’m not a candy-assed suck-up.”

“That still doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay rent, or at least help out on the weekend.”

Mitch peered down into his ashtray as into a prison yard crowded with dusty inmates, considering how to squeeze another in. “Who appointed you Jesus Christ around here?” he said, unoriginally. “I don’t have to negotiate with you.”

But Dorothy refused to talk to Mitch (“I’d rather just sell the house,” she said), and Walter, at the end of the school year, which was also the start of the motel’s high season, such as it was, decided to force the issue by going on strike. As long as he was around the motel, he couldn’t not do the things that needed doing. The only way to make Mitch take responsibility was to leave, and so he announced that he was going to spend the summer fixing up the lake house and making an experimental nature film. His father said that if he wanted to get the house into better shape to be sold, that was fine with him, but the house would be sold in any case. His mother begged him to forget about the house. She said it had been selfish of her to make such a big deal about it, she didn’t care about the house, she just wanted everyone to get along, and when Walter said that he was going anyway, she cried out that if he really cared about her wishes he would not be leaving. But he was feeling, for the first time, truly angry with her. It didn’t matter how much she loved him or how well he understood her-he hated her for submitting so meekly to his father and his brother. He was sick to death of it. He got his best friend, Mary Siltala, to drive him down to the lake house with a duffel bag of clothes, ten gallons of house paint, his old one-speed bike, a secondhand paperback copy of Walden, the Super-8 movie camera that he’d borrowed from the high-school AV Department, and eight yellow boxes of Super-8 film. It was by far the most rebellious thing he’d ever done.