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.
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.
