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.

A month before her second birthday we were downtown and he stopped dead in front of Deerling's window.

There was a little red party dress on a small mannequin. Tulle skirt, satin band, the kind of thing that exists purely to be twirled in.

"Mom. Birdie would look like a princess in that."

I told him Rhonda wasn't doing a party that year. That was true and I said it as gently as I could — the therapy schedule had eaten everything, including the birthday.

He didn't say anything else about it.

That was the part that should have tipped me off, honestly, because Milo is not a boy who lets things go.

Over the next six weeks I noticed him turning down the ice cream truck. He raked leaves for Mr. Ostrowski and for the Petrosyans and for a woman on the next street I'd never met, and he asked to be paid in cash and put it in a sock.