A boy of eight had understood, at some level below words, that the thing happening to him in that cafeteria was rare enough and precious enough to be kept — that he had better hold on to the proof of it, because he might need it later, when the evidence of human kindness ran thin.

And he had been right.

He had needed it.

He had gone through the hard passages of a hard early life, the ones I never saw and can only imagine, holding a soft yellow lunch card in a drawer somewhere, taking it out on the nights when the world had shown him nothing but its cold face, and looking at it, and telling himself: it is not true that no one cares.

Once, someone did.