And Grady’s car was gone.
There was a note on the kitchen counter, under the sugar bowl, four words in his handwriting.
I’m not built for this.
I was twenty-eight years old. I was single. I was a mechanic at Tulley’s Garage on Vessel Street making nineteen dollars an hour and I lived in a one-bedroom over a laundromat.
I sat on the floor of that kitchen for a while.
Then I made a four-year-old some toast, because he was awake and standing in the doorway asking where his dad was.
Here’s what people don’t understand about how these things actually go.
There was no big noble decision. There was no moment where I stood up straight and said I will raise this boy.
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.
