Estelle looked at that dress and laughed and said: you skipped lunch for that?
Then she shrugged and said: you’re wasting your money. That child doesn’t even understand birthdays.
My son’s face closed. I have seen him disappointed before and it does not look like that.
And he said: she knows when someone’s kind to her.
The kitchen window was open. It was warm that week. I did not think about it for one second and if I had thought about it I would have been worrying about Hesper hearing, and Hesper lives on the other side.
He gave Wilda the dress the next afternoon in her back yard, at a party with nine people at it, four of whom were us.
She squealed when Hesper got it on her. She grabbed two handfuls of the skirt and turned round and round until she nearly went over, and Orson laughed so hard he had to sit down on the grass.
That night I told my son I was proud of him and he said thanks and asked whether he could have a second yoghurt.
At half past six the next morning he came into my room and said I had to see something.
Our lawn was covered in lunchboxes.
Fifty of them, easily. Dinosaurs. Footballs. Superheroes. Bright plastic from the porch steps almost to the sidewalk.
Not dumped. Laid out — in rows, evenly spaced, the way you set a table.
Somebody had walked back and forth across that wet grass in the dark, for what I have since worked out must have been over an hour, and not one person on that street woke up.
He said: are they all for me?
I had no idea.
Then he saw the one in the middle.
An enormous battered metal lunchbox. The old kind with a catch, dented down one side, sitting on its own in a gap where nothing else had been put.
A piece of paper taped to the lid.
Open this one first.
He knelt down and opened it, and for about four seconds he did not move at all.
Then he came away from it backwards and he was shaking.
He said: Mom, there’s so much. Is it stolen? Should we call someone?
People were out by then. Sixteen of them on the sidewalk in dressing gowns and coats pulled over pyjamas.
I sent Orson inside and shut the door behind him, and I stood on my own lawn in a cardigan with that box open behind me.
