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.

It's in a trust now, structured so it doesn't wreck her benefits eligibility, which took a lawyer and four months. Birdie's therapies are paid through the end of elementary school.

The fifty lunchboxes came to about six hundred dollars. That went in too.

Wendell lived fourteen more months, which was longer than anyone told him he would.

Milo went down there most Saturdays. That was not my idea and I want to be honest that I was uneasy about it for the first month, and Officer Kell, who checked in twice more than she needed to, said something to me that settled it: "Ma'am, that man photographed the only thing he could still reach."

Milo learned to load film. He learned what an f-stop was, at nine, from a man who could not walk to his own mailbox. There are pictures in this house of my son's ninth birthday that were taken from a second-floor window sixty yards away and they are better than anything I have ever taken with a phone.