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.

Admission record. Larchmont State School. Junie Pike, age four. Diagnosis line filled out in fountain pen.

There was a photograph clipped to it of two children on a porch step — a boy of about nine with his arm around a little girl in a light-colored dress, both of them squinting into the sun.

And there was a bundle of letters. Thirty-one of them, in their original envelopes, all addressed in the same shaky block capitals, all with the same three-word stamp across the front.

RETURN TO SENDER.

Every one was addressed to a woman in the next county.

Mrs. Rosalind Marsh.

I read Wendell's letter that night, after Milo was asleep, at the kitchen table with the folder open in front of me.

It was four pages, in the block capitals, and it took him — he told me later — eleven days to write, because his hands were not good anymore and he would do half a page and have to stop.