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.

Milo has all fifty notes in a shoebox. He does not have the money; that went where I'll describe in a minute.

But Wendell hadn't seen the post. He isn't online. He had no idea the other lunchboxes were coming, and when he set his down at two in the morning it was the only one there.

He found out about the dress because he had watched the whole two years of it through a lens from sixty yards away.

Officer Kell drove me down there on Thursday. Rhonda came too. Dean stayed with Milo.

He was in a chair by the window with an oxygen cannula and a blanket over his knees and he apologized before we were all the way in the room. He apologized for about four minutes straight, until Rhonda told him to stop, in the tone she uses on Birdie's insurance company.

He said he hadn't thought about how the top picture would look. He said he'd picked that one because it was the only one where you could see the boy's face clearly enough to know who he was, and it had not once occurred to him — and he said this with his eyes shut — that a child opening a box and finding a photograph of himself taken from a distance would be frightened.