My eight-year-old skipped lunch for four weeks to buy a red dress for the two-year-old next door. The morning after he gave it to her, fifty lunchboxes were laid out in rows on our lawn — and the one in the middle had been filling up since 1985.
PART 1
Hesper has raised Wilda on her own since she was three weeks old.
Wilda has Down syndrome. She was about to turn two. The developmental therapy is four hundred dollars a month and there is no second wage in that house, and Hesper does the accounts for two businesses out of her kitchen at night.
My son Orson is eight and he has adored that child since the day she came home.
He sits by her stroller on the driveway and draws. He brings her dandelions out of our yard like they are roses and she takes them in both hands every single time as though it has never happened before.
He makes her laugh harder than anybody alive, including her own mother, and Hesper has said so to me twice.
About a month before her birthday he saw a little red dress in a window on Wicker Street.
He said: Mom, Wilda would look like a princess in that.
I told him the truth, which is that there was not going to be a birthday that year.
He did not let it go.
For three weeks I noticed him turning down money for treats and offering to rake the Pritchetts’ leaves for six dollars, and I thought it was sweet and I did not look any further.
What I did not know is that he had also stopped buying lunch.
Twenty school days.
He took the money I gave him every morning, put it in a sock at the back of his sock drawer, and told me every single evening that he had eaten.
I have asked him since what he actually did at lunchtime and he said he sat with Marek and talked, and that it was fine, and he said it in the tone children use when they want you to stop.
I found out on a Thursday when he came downstairs and put the dress on the kitchen table, and I did the arithmetic in about four seconds and then had to go and stand at the sink with my back to the room.
My mother-in-law was staying that week.
