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.

Every letter came back.

He moved three streets away from her son's family and he never once contacted us, because he had promised his mother, in 1981, that he would not put himself in front of Rosalind again, and he is a man who keeps things.

Dean drove out to his mother's house on Saturday with the folder.

I did not go and he has never given me a full account. What he has told me is this. He put the photograph of the two children on her kitchen table. She looked at it for a long time. And she said, "Where did you get that."

He said, "Who is she."

And Rosalind said, "That's Junie."

Just like that. No hesitation, no confusion, no pretending. She had been carrying that name in her mouth for sixty-six years, ready to go.

Then she told him a version of it, badly and out of order, over about forty minutes, and at the end of it she said the only sentence out of the entire business that I have ever felt any pity about.