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.

Their mother did not want to. Their father did. Wendell was nine and had no vote.

Junie lived there for nineteen years. She died there in 1978 of pneumonia, at twenty-three, and is buried in a numbered plot on the grounds, because that is what they did, and the state put up a memorial with names on it in 2006, and Junie Pike's name is on it, and Wendell has been out there four times.

Rosalind was seven when her sister was taken away.

The family did not speak of her again. Not at Christmas, not at either parent's funeral, not once. Wendell told us his mother kept one photograph in a drawer under the linens and that when she died in 1981 he took it, and Rosalind never asked where it went.

He wrote to his sister for fifty years.

Birthdays, mostly. Junie's birthday, in April, every year. Then, later, whenever something happened — when his wife died, when he got the diagnosis, when he moved to Bellamy Row in 1994.