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.

She said, "They took her out the front door and my mother made me look at my arithmetic."

Dean asked her why she'd said what she said at our table.

She did not answer that. She has never answered it, to him or to me, and I have stopped waiting.

What I think — and this is my opinion and I could be wrong — is that she has spent sixty-six years unable to look directly at what happened to her sister, and that a two-year-old in a red dress twirling in a back yard while a whole street watched and loved her was the single most unbearable thing that could possibly have happened three houses from Wendell Pike's window.

That is an explanation. I want to be careful here. It is not a defense, and I have never offered it to her as one, and there is a boy in my house who heard what she said about his friend, and I do not get to trade his memory of it for her history.