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 box sitting alone in the middle of the grass, was a note that said: OPEN THIS ONE FIRST.
Our neighbor Rhonda has raised her daughter alone since the week she brought her home.
Birdie was born with Down syndrome.
She was two.
My son was eight.
And he absolutely adored her.
He sat on the curb beside her stroller and drew her pictures. He brought her dandelions from our yard, whole fistfuls of them, roots and dirt still hanging from the stems.
He could make her laugh harder than anyone alive just by putting a plastic bowl on his head.
A month before her birthday, we were downtown when he stopped dead in front of a store window.
There was a little red party dress displayed on a tiny mannequin.
Mom. Birdie would look like a princess in that.
I told him Rhonda wasn’t planning a party that year.
