The sound of glass shattering and then the thud of the baseball as it buried itself into his couch alerted Himchan to the fact that someone had just broken his window.

            “What the hell?” He took off his glasses and got up to see who the culprit was. Unlike other children, this boy did not run away. He stood in the middle of the driveway, staring almost defiantly into Himchan’s eyes until the grown man opened his mouth to speak. That was when he the heels of his tattered sneakers and began to run.

            The kid was one he had seen often in the neighborhood. Nobody knew to whom he belonged to nor did they know where he came from. He showed up one day in his then white t-shirt and blue jeans and now his hair was unruly and he was no longer clean. He was clearly homeless or being neglected. Not that the two was mutually exclusive.

            His wife came home to find him cleaning up the shards and taping up their window until they could buy a replacement. “What in the world happened?”

            He contemplated telling her a lie. While he felt bad for the kid, he wasn’t quite sure how she would feel about a delinquent ruining their hard-earned home. There was something in him that made him tell the truth. “The homeless kid broke it.”

            The look on her face went through a series of changes. First it was annoyance, then brief anger and because Himchan knew her, he saw the resignation and the sigh that passed through her meant she was no longer angry. “Does nobody know where his family is?”

            There was a shard of glass on the couch and Himchan swept it away. He took the broom and carefully dumped out the rest of the glass. “I wonder where he sleeps at night.”

            The comment was said casually but she glanced at him immediately. “Himchan, are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

            “I don’t know. You tell me.”

            “He belongs to someone, Channie. We have no right to take him in.”

            “Clearly whoever he belongs to isn’t taking very good care of him, are they?” He argued back. The thought had been on his mind for a while and now that he was able to voice it, he wanted to make it come true. Adoption had never been something on his mind but now that he thought about it, it didn’t seem like a bad idea.

            She was crumbling; he could see it. He saw it in the small sighs that escaped and then the softening in her eyes. “Himchan there has to be a procedure to this.”

            “Yeah but we can at least give him a place to sleep and food to eat before we continue, right? It shouldn’t be so bad.”

            The last of the glass shards were officially thrown away and the windows patched. “Fine. Find him and bring him in.”

            It was harder than he imagined to bring the child in. The child, thinking that he was going to get in troubled for the vandalism, had struggled and bit quite ferociously. If Himchan hadn’t been so determined to help him, he would have dropped his hold on the ripped shirt.

            “You’re not in trouble. I just wanted to give you food.”

            “You’re lying.” The matter-of-fact tone the child spat that in surprised him. “All adults lie.”

             It wasn’t until his wife came out with a plate of cookies and a sandwich that the child had stopped struggling. He cast a suspicious glance at the two of them before devouring the food.

            “Slowly. You’re going to give yourself indigestion.”

             “Sunggyu,” was the answer when asked for the kid’s name. “Left,” was all he would say about his parents.

            Adoption would be difficult because of so many documents that he didn’t have but the child was slowly becoming part of the family. After realizing that these two adults wanted to help him, he had returned to the child he had been.

            “Why were you so nice?” he asked one night. It was the night after the official adoption forms had been signed and stamped by the court. “Dad?” The word came out hesitantly, even though Himchan had been encouraging him to use it for a while.

            Himchan grinned and shrugged. “I guess I always knew there had to be a reason why I would be the unlucky one to have my window smashed in by a kid who was hungry. I figured I did the right thing, didn’t I?”

            Sunggyu smiled. There was a gap where his front tooth had fallen out just yesterday. “Thank you.”