Some people have asked me how I did it. I tell them the same thing every time. I didn’t think about it long enough to talk myself out of it.

My name is Nona. I am sixty-four years old and I live in a two-bedroom house in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I retired from the county school system in 2017, after thirty-one years working the cafeteria line. I know every child’s face. I know when a child is hungry and pretending not to be. It is a thing you learn, and then you cannot unlearn it.

My husband Raymond passed in the spring of 2018. We never had children of our own. The house got quiet in the way that houses do when there’s only one person left moving through them.

Then in 2019, my sister Darlene was incarcerated.

Darlene’s daughter Camille was eight years old.

The social worker called and went through the list of family members who had been contacted. My brother Marcus in Greensboro said he was not in a position to take a child. My cousin Tricia in Charlotte said she didn’t have the space. Two other relatives had been reached and said they would be praying for Camille. The social worker said this carefully, and I could hear in her voice that she was tired of making this particular kind of phone call.

“What about you?” she asked. “You’d be looking at a formal adoption process. I have to be honest with you — it can be difficult when the prospective parent is over sixty.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Do you want some time to think about it?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll take her.”

I hung up the phone. I went and sat at my kitchen table for a minute. Then I got up and changed the sheets in the second bedroom.

Camille arrived on a Tuesday evening in September. She was brought by a woman from the county office who carried a clipboard and was very kind. Camille had a backpack with a broken zipper. The main compartment was held shut with a safety pin. Inside the front pocket was a gallon Ziploc bag containing her toothbrush, a travel-size bar of Dial soap, and a small stuffed dog that was missing one eye.

She stood in my hallway and looked at the walls. I have pictures up — Raymond, my church group, a framed print my mother gave me thirty years ago.

“Is this your house?” she asked.

“It’s our house now,” I told her. “If you want it.”

She didn’t say anything. She just walked past me into the kitchen and set her Ziploc bag on the counter next to the sink, very deliberately, the way you do when you are staking a small claim. I watched her do it and I had to turn away for a second.

The adoption process was, as the social worker had warned, difficult.

There were home visits. There were background checks and financial disclosures and a parenting evaluation that involved a licensed psychologist asking me questions for two hours about my childhood, my marriage, my readiness to parent a child as a sixty-one-year-old widow. I answered every question. I did not complain.

There were three different court dates. There was a guardian ad litem — an attorney appointed to represent Camille’s interests separately from mine. She was a serious woman named Patricia who came to my house twice and sat at my kitchen table and watched how Camille and I talked to each other.

The worst day was in February of 2021. We were two months from the finalization date when the whole case nearly collapsed because of a filing error on a document I had submitted in good faith. It was a form issue, not a substantive one, but it required a new hearing date and a two-month delay.

I sat in the parking lot of the Fayetteville courthouse in my car and cried for twenty minutes. Then I called my attorney. Then I drove home and made Camille a grilled cheese and did not say a word about it.

She looked at me across the table and said, “Nona, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, baby,” I said. “I’m just tired today.”

She nodded. She finished her sandwich. I was not fine, but I was not going to let that child carry one more ounce of uncertainty than she already had.

The adoption was finalized on April 14, 2021.

I wore a blue dress. Camille wore a yellow dress with little white flowers on it. She had picked it out herself at Target two weeks earlier and refused to let me see it until the morning of court. She came out of her room and did a little turn and said “How do I look?” I said she looked perfect. She said she knew.

My neighbor Margaret drove us. She sat in the gallery with her hands in her lap and her lips pressed together the whole time.

The judge looked at Camille over his reading glasses and asked her directly: “Young lady, do you understand what’s happening here today?”

Camille sat up very straight in the chair beside me. “Yes sir,” she said. “I’m getting a grandma.”

The judge laughed. I covered my mouth with my hand. Margaret made a sound in the gallery. The clerk typed something and pretended she hadn’t.

That evening I made macaroni and cheese. Camille had been asking for it for a week. She ate two full bowls and then asked if we could watch a movie.

“What movie do you want?” I said.

She shrugged. “Whatever you want, Grandma Nona.”

That was the first time she called me that. Grandma Nona. I had not asked her to. I do not know where it came from. I went and got a bowl of popcorn from the kitchen and sat down next to her on the couch and she put her feet up on the coffee table the way she always does, the way that drives me a little crazy, and I did not say a word about the feet.

She is eleven now. She is doing well in school. She has a best friend named Kyra and she is very particular about which brand of colored pencils she uses and she still has that stuffed dog, even though she says she’s too old for it.

The social worker said this would be hard. She was right. What she didn’t say was that it would also be the best thing I have done in this life.

Some things you just don’t think about long enough to talk yourself out of.