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.

He raked leaves for Mrs Ostrom at number 9 and would not tell me what he got.

He asked me twice whether I’d pay him for jobs he already does for free, which I said no to, and which I now feel about the way you’d expect.

What I did not know — what I did not find out until the eighth of May — is that he had also stopped buying lunch.

I give him five dollars a day. It goes in the front pocket of his bag.

For forty school days, from the middle of March to the eighth of May, my son took that five dollars into Alderman Elementary, walked past the till, and did not spend it.

And every single evening when I asked him what he’d had, he told me. Chicken burger. Pasta. The macaroni thing. He described it.

He is eight years old and he lied to my face two hundred times about lunch.