That part is simple and I’ll get it out of the way. Rhonda’s post went around the neighborhood group. A woman two blocks over had the idea. She put it up on Tuesday night and by Wednesday morning fifty households had put a lunchbox on our lawn, most of them with a few dollars in it and a note. Some of the notes were from kids. One said, in enormous pencil letters, THANKS FOR BEING NICE TO BIRDIE FROM DANIEL AGE 6.
Milo has all fifty notes in a shoebox. He does not have the money; that went where I’ll describe in a minute.
But Wendell hadn’t seen the post. He isn’t online. He had no idea the other lunchboxes were coming, and when he set his down at two in the morning it was the only one there.
He found out about the dress because he had watched the whole two years of it through a lens from sixty yards away.
Officer Kell drove me down there on Thursday. Rhonda came too. Dean stayed with Milo.
He was in a chair by the window with an oxygen cannula and a blanket over his knees and he apologized before we were all the way in the room. He apologized for about four minutes straight, until Rhonda told him to stop, in the tone she uses on Birdie’s insurance company.
He said he hadn’t thought about how the top picture would look. He said he’d picked that one because it was the only one where you could see the boy’s face clearly enough to know who he was, and it had not once occurred to him — and he said this with his eyes shut — that a child opening a box and finding a photograph of himself taken from a distance would be frightened.
“Eighty-one years old,” he said. “And I never thought of it.”
Then he asked whether Milo was all right, and Rhonda said he would be, and Wendell Pike cried a little, and we all pretended to look at the window.
He had written a letter. It was in the brown envelope under the photographs and I hadn’t gotten to it, because I’d closed the lid.
Officer Kell had read it. She’d told me on Wednesday that it explained things and that I should read it when I had a quiet hour, and I hadn’t yet, and I sat in that room while an old man told me the short version out loud.
He said he had watched a boy give up his lunch for a little girl the way nobody had ever done for his sister.
And that’s when the second thing came out of the lunchbox.
Under the money there was a manila folder, soft with age, and inside it were papers from 1959.
Admission record. Larchmont State School. Junie Pike, age four. Diagnosis line filled out in fountain pen.
There was a photograph clipped to it of two children on a porch step — a boy of about nine with his arm around a little girl in a light-colored dress, both of them squinting into the sun.
And there was a bundle of letters. Thirty-one of them, in their original envelopes, all addressed in the same shaky block capitals, all with the same three-word stamp across the front.
RETURN TO SENDER.
Every one was addressed to a woman in the next county.
Mrs. Rosalind Marsh.
I read Wendell’s letter that night, after Milo was asleep, at the kitchen table with the folder open in front of me.
It was four pages, in the block capitals, and it took him — he told me later — eleven days to write, because his hands were not good anymore and he would do half a page and have to stop.
He explained the camera first. He was careful about that and I think he had thought hard about the order. He said he had bought it in 1996 to photograph birds and had used it for birds for twenty years, and that when he stopped being able to go out to the reservoir he had turned it on the street, and that he understood how that sounded and he wanted it said plainly rather than found out.
