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.

It was hard.

Money was the first thing. I made nineteen dollars an hour and childcare was a hundred and forty a week, and for two years I worked six days and my mother had him on Saturdays until she got sick in 2015.

I sold my father’s truck in 2014. A ’92 Ford I’d had since I was seventeen and had rebuilt twice. I sold it for four thousand one hundred dollars because Amari had started having night terrors — the screaming kind, four or five a week — and the counselor who could actually help was not covered by anything.

Twenty-two sessions. He stopped screaming in his sleep in March of 2015.

I never told him about the truck. He was six.

Then there was the other thing, which is that a four-year-old whose mother died and whose father drove away does not simply become fine.

He was angry from about seven to about ten. Properly angry. There was a stretch in third grade where I was in that school so often the office ladies knew my order.