“That’s his lunchbox to fill or not,” Walter says. “I can only carry my own across the street.”
Walter’s curtains stay open now.
He sits on his porch most afternoons, and the neighborhood kids stop by, because Noah told everyone that the gray house has “the nicest grandpa,” and Noah’s word is law among the under-tens.
He’s Grandpa Walter to the whole street now.
He waited nine years to be anyone’s grandpa, and now he’s fifty kids’ grandpa, which is either a cruel joke or a merciful one, depending on the day.
He says merciful.
He’s decided to believe it’s merciful.
And Noah?
Noah still skips a treat sometimes and saves the money, and I stopped worrying about it, because now I know where it goes.
Last month it was rain boots for a kid two streets over.
He has a notebook now — Carol bought it for him — where he keeps track of “kids who need something.” He won’t show me all of it. He says some of it’s private, which, in an eight-year-old, is a sentence that should terrify a parent and instead just makes me proud.
The fifty lunchboxes are stacked in our garage. We couldn’t bear to throw them out.
Every so often a kid comes to reclaim theirs, and every so often one gets left forever, and I’ve started a shelf of them, these bright dinosaur-and-superhero boxes, monuments to the morning a neighborhood decided a little girl was worth it.
But the big battered metal one stays in the house.
