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 wore the red dress to that party. It doesn't fit anymore. It came to about the middle of her shins and the satin band sat up under her arms and she would not hear one word about wearing anything else, and Rhonda gave up at nine in the morning.

She grabbed the skirt in both fists and spun until she went down in the grass, exactly like the first time, and about thirty adults on that lawn made a noise like they'd been hit.

That child doesn't even know what a birthday is.

My mother-in-law said that at my table, holding a four-dollar dress in the air, in front of fourteen people who all looked at their plates.

Her brother was three houses away at his window with a camera he'd bought at an estate sale, keeping the only record anyone kept of a boy being kind to a little girl, because when he was nine years old they took his sister out the front door and nobody wrote any of it down at all.