I adopted my best friend’s son after he abandoned him — years later, the boy invited him to a championship game and gave a speech that made me break down.

What there was, was eleven days of me having him at my apartment while everybody assumed Grady would come back.

Then a caseworker named Rosalind, who was thirty years old and had eighty-one cases, sat in that apartment and explained to me what happens next, and asked me whether I was a relative, and I said no.

She said, “Are you willing to be considered?”

And I said yes, because the alternative was that a woman I had never met was going to put that kid in a car.

Certified as a foster placement in June 2012. Guardianship in December. Adoption finalized on the fourteenth of November, 2013, in a courtroom that took eleven minutes and had a bowl of lollipops in it.

Amari was five. He wore a clip-on tie that he refused to take off for two days.

I want to be honest about the years, because the version where a single mechanic raises a boy and it’s all montage is an insult to everybody who has actually done it.