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.

He explained the camera first. He was careful about that and I think he had thought hard about the order. He said he had bought it in 1996 to photograph birds and had used it for birds for twenty years, and that when he stopped being able to go out to the reservoir he had turned it on the street, and that he understood how that sounded and he wanted it said plainly rather than found out.

Then he explained the money. He wrote that he had no children, that his nieces and nephews had been raised not knowing he existed, and that his estate would otherwise go to the state after the funeral home took what it took.

Then there was one paragraph about Junie, five sentences long, and then a line I have not been able to get out of my head since.

He wrote: I watched that boy go without his lunch for a girl who cannot say his name. I did not know people still did that. I thought it went out with my mother.