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.

He said, "I didn't buy lunch."

"Since when."

"Since the store."

"Milo. Since the store? That was the fourteenth of—"

And he said, "I had breakfast every day," like that was the defense, like a lawyer he'd seen on television.

I called the school the next morning. His teacher had noticed him not going through the line and had assumed, reasonably, that he'd started bringing food from home, because half that class does. She was upset about it. She's a good teacher and she called me back that afternoon after checking with the cafeteria, and the number she gave me was twenty-nine days.

Twenty-nine school days.

He is eight. He weighed fifty-two pounds. I took him to Dr. Iyer that Friday and he was fine — a pound down, nothing frightening — and I sat in that little room and got told, kindly, that children are more robust than parents can stand to think about, and I went out to the car and put my head on the steering wheel for a while.