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 0ne* a beat-up metal thing sitting alone in the middle 0f the grass, was a note that said OPEN THIS ONE FIRST.

Birdie was born with Down syndrome. Rhonda was twenty-six and the father was gone by the second trimester, and for two years the entire operation had been one woman, one car with a check-engine light, and a schedule of therapies stacked so tight she ate lunch in parking lots.

My son adored that little girl.

I don’t know how else to say it. Milo was eight and Birdie was two and there was no logic in it. He sat on the curb next to her stroller and drew her pictures. He brought her dandelions out of our yard, the whole fistful, roots and dirt still on them. He could make her laugh harder than anyone alive, including her own mother, by putting a plastic bowl on his head.

A month before her second birthday we were downtown and he stopped dead in front of Deerling’s window.

There was a little red party dress on a small mannequin. Tulle skirt, satin band, the kind of thing that exists purely to be twirled in.

“Mom. Birdie would look like a princess in that.”

I told him Rhonda wasn’t doing a party that year. That was true and I said it as gently as I could — the therapy schedule had eaten everything, including the birthday.

He didn’t say anything else about it.