In March of 2000, a scared little boy came to live at our house. I’ll call him Boo after the scared little girl in Monsters and Ink (as my kids like to call it).

Boo was about seven months younger than my son. They instantly fell in step, like brothers. It mattered not in the least that one was black and the other white, one had fine blonde hair the other black curly hair, one blue eyed the other brown. Everywhere we went together people would do a double take. “Are they brothers?” “Sure!” They certainly acted like it.

Boo had a brother, who was in another foster home. Yeah, we’re foster parents, and Boo came here when his mom left him at a friends house so she could run to the store. She never came back. His brother had been in care for a number of years; they let her keep Boo since she was trying hard to mend her ways. Ooops.

Time went by. We had lots of adventures – vacations, trips to the zoo and the park. In 2001 it became clear that Boo’s mom was losing custody of both kids. Boo and his brother would go to live in the same home, together, brothers at last. But they hardly knew each other. His brother had “issues,” he knew his mom and how badly she screwed their family over. He was in trouble at school, at home. But still a good kid.

We knew we could fight, we could go to a judge and insist that Boo belonged to us now. My son’s brother! Surely they had a stronger bond than this other kid who he hardly knew. But in the eyes of the law, blood is everything. It doesn’t matter who you love or who you spend your time with, the blood relation wins out. It would be a difficult fight, and one we were sure to ultimately lose. We had to try and do right for Boo.

We looked inside and decided that the best thing to do would be to let him go. As the time drew closer, other things happened. Planes flew into towers, relatives got sick and either died or got well. The people adopting the boys were acquaintances, they lived a hundred miles away. We went to their house. She ran her own day care and could be with Boo all day every day. His brother would be in school a half a mile away. They came in their truck and got his stuff – in a year and a half, a little boy can accumulate quite a few things.

We made sure to pack his sword, he and my son used to love to do swordfights; it was like a wild west show where they worked out a script and took turns dying. They did this at the Rennaisance festival and drew a crowd, I swear they needed a tip jar. “Are they brothers?” “Hell, yes.”

His new mom, his forever mom, didn’t like weapons. We sent the sword anyway. Heh.

His last morning with us, Halloween 2001, I tucked him into a car seat for the last time. He looked at me and wouldn’t say a word. I tried to be profound, and about all I could come up with was “I love you, Boo. Take care.”

And then he was gone.