My eight-year-old skipped lunch for six weeks to buy a red dress for the little girl across the street. The next morning our lawn was covered with fifty lunchboxes — and taped to the biggest one, a beat-up metal thing sitting alone in the middle of the grass, was a note that said OPEN THIS ONE FIRST.

PART 1 — OPEN THIS ONE FIRST

Rhonda Alcott has raised her daughter alone on Bellamy Row since the week she brought her home.

Birdie was born with Down syndrome. Rhonda was twenty-six and the father was gone by the second trimester, and for two years the entire operation had been one woman, one car with a check-engine light, and a schedule of therapies stacked so tight she ate lunch in parking lots.

My son adored that little girl.

I don't know how else to say it. Milo was eight and Birdie was two and there was no logic in it. He sat on the curb next to her stroller and drew her pictures. He brought her dandelions out of our yard, the whole fistful, roots and dirt still on them. He could make her laugh harder than anyone alive, including her own mother, by putting a plastic bowl on his head.