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.

Two hundred dollars. The dress was sixty-two.

He handed over sixty-two dollars in ones and coins in a shop on Marrow Street on the eighth of May and the woman on the till had to count it twice.

My mother-in-law was staying with us that week.

Bernice Vandrey is sixty-six and she is my husband’s mother and she is the most financially frightening person I have ever met.

She has never in her life spent money she did not have to spend. She reuses envelopes. She turned down a coat from us in 2021 and she needed a coat.

Felix came in that evening with the bag from the shop and he was so pleased with himself he could barely hold it.

He got the dress out and held it up in my kitchen.

And Bernice said, “How did you pay for that?”

And he told her. All of it. The leaves, the ice cream, and the lunches.