My 8-year-old son gave up his lunch money to buy a little girl with Down syndrome a red dress—the next morning, our lawn was covered with lunchboxes, but what was inside the biggest one made him go pale.

And Bernice.

She has been to our house every second Sunday since June, which is new. It used to be about four times a year.

She and Felix are — I don’t have a word for it. She is not soft with him. She has never mentioned the lunchbox to him and he has never mentioned it to her, and I think that’s an agreement neither of them made out loud.

But in October he asked her to teach him to darn a sock, because he’d seen her do it, and they sat at that table for an hour and a half and he still has the sock and it is a terrible sock.

Here’s the thing.

Everybody who hears this story loves the lawn. Fifty-one lunchboxes at half past six in the morning, in rows, in colour. It is a great image and it belongs in exactly the sort of story people like reading.