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.

Wendell died in September, in the hospital in Corwin Springs, and Dean was there, and Rhonda was there, and Birdie was in the hallway with me eating crackers.

Rosalind did not come.

She came to the funeral. She sat in the third row on the wrong side and left before the reception, and she and Dean did not speak, and I have decided that is between the two of them.

Birdie turned four in April.

Rhonda did a real party this time — the whole street, honestly, half of Bellamy Row in her back yard, because after two years of lunchboxes it had stopped being possible to keep the neighbors out of anything.

Birdie has words now. Not many, and they come hard, and every one of them cost more work than most people put into a degree.

One of them is birthday. She says it as one long joined-up sound and she uses it for anything good — cake, the sprinkler, a dog she likes, the sound of Milo's bike on the driveway.