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.

She said, “You went without your lunch? For forty days?”

And she laughed. It was not a cruel laugh, in fairness to her — it was disbelief. But it was a laugh, and it went on about two seconds too long.

And then she said the thing.

“You’ve wasted your money, sweetheart. That little girl doesn’t understand birthdays.”

My son’s face came off. I watched it go.

And then Felix said — at eight years old, holding a dress, to a woman he is quite frightened of —

“She knows when someone’s being kind to her.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Bernice put her cup in the sink and went upstairs, and I did not go after her, which I have thought about since.

Effie’s birthday was Saturday the tenth of May.

Perrin did do something in the end. Nine people in a small back garden, a shop cake, a paddling pool with about four inches of water in it.