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.

The last page was instructions. Where the account was. Who to call. The name of a lawyer he had already spoken to. He had thought about the tax on it. He had written down the phone number of the funeral home and paid the deposit already, in June, so that nobody would have to.

At the very bottom, under his signature, he had written one more line, and then crossed it out, and then written it again underneath the crossing-out, which is the single most human thing in the entire document.

If the boy wants to know how the camera works I am home every day.

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PART 4 — THREE HOUSES DOWN

My husband found out he had an uncle when he was forty-one years old, standing in our kitchen, holding a photograph of two children on a porch step.

He found out he'd had an aunt about nine seconds later.

Junie Pike was born in 1955 with Down syndrome. In 1959, when she was four, she was placed at Larchmont State School, which was the standard advice given to families in this state at that time and which was, as we now know and as the state has formally acknowledged, a catastrophe.