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.
Here is what I did about it, since people always want to know.
We made a rule and we said it out loud together: nobody in this house gives away what they need. You give away what you have. Those are different, and if you can’t tell which is which, you come and ask me.
And I put three dollars a day into an envelope on the refrigerator with his name on it, and told him that money was his to give away to anybody he wanted, no questions, ever — but the lunch line was not a fundraising opportunity.
He has never done it again. He also, I have noticed, has never once taken from that envelope for himself.
His grandmother was at the house that Sunday.
Rosalind comes for dinner the last Sunday of the month, and that month it was the whole family, fourteen of us, the table extended with the card table on the end the way it always is.
Milo had gone upstairs to wrap the dress. I came back down the hall with the Deerling’s bag to get the tape, and Rosalind stood up out of her chair and took it out of my hands.
I didn’t let go right away. The handles stretched between us for a second before they came free.
She set it on the table, reached in through the tissue paper, and lifted the dress out by the shoulders, up at the height of her own face, so everyone could see it.
