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holding me, she sat down on her couch, rolling me onto my back in the cradle of her arm. “Okay, okay now,” Jennifer said. “Nice and still.”
    She reached over and picked something up, an odd-shaped thing that she slowly lowered toward my face. What was she doing? I squirmed a little.
    “You need to be still now, puppy. This will go okay if you don’t fight it,” Jennifer said.
    Her voice was soothing, but I still didn’t know what was going on. But then I caught the delicious scent of warm milk—the thing she was holding was oozing food. The tip of it was soft and when she probed my lips with it I seized it and sucked and was rewarded with a warm, sweet meal.
    In a way, it was like being nursed by my mother, except that I was on my back and the thing in my mouth was very large. The milk was quite different, too, more sweet and light, but I wasn’t complaining. I sucked and that wonderful warm liquid erased away the ache in my belly.
    When I was full I was drowsy and Jennifer held me and patted me on my back and I burped a little. Then she took me down the hall to a soft bed, where the big dog with the huge ears was sleeping, my brother nuzzled up against him.
    “Here’s another one, Barney,” Jennifer whispered.
    The big dog groaned, but he wagged his tail and didn’t move when I nestled up against him. Though he was a male, his tummy was warm and comforting, just like Mother’s.
    My brother squeaked out a greeting and then went right back to sleep.
    From that point forward, Jennifer fed us in her lap several times a day. I grew to love the feedings and the way Jennifer would talk to me as she cuddled me. It would be easy to love someone like Jennifer.
    My brother was distressed when I was fed before he was, and I think Jennifer decided it made more sense to have me go second than to feed me with my brother crying the whole time.
    I think I had known it all along, but one day while I was squatting and smelled my urine it occurred to me that we weren’t brothers but brother and sister. I was a female dog!
    I wondered briefly what had happened to our mother and to my other siblings, but it seemed as if I couldn’t really even remember them anymore. We lived here now, my brother and I, a family of two puppies and a lazy dog named Barney. I would have to get used to being a female and being in this odd living situation.
    I decided that there were times when all a dog could do was wait and see what would happen next, what choices people would make that would change everything or make it more of the same. In the meantime, my brother and I put our efforts into tugging on Barney’s soft, floppy ears.
    Jennifer called my brother Rocky and me Molly. As we grew stronger, Barney wanted to have less and less to do with us, becoming impatient with us chewing on his body parts. That was okay, though, because a big gray dog named Che came to stay with us at the house. Che loved to run around the backyard, where the grass was just starting to pop up in the warming spring sun. He was very fast and Rocky and I could not hope to catch up to him, but he wanted us to chase him and when we would give up he would dart over and bow down to get us to play again. And then there was a stocky dog named Mr. Churchill. He was a bit like Barney in size except that he was heavier, and his ears were very short. Mr. Churchill wheezed and waddled when he walked—he was the exact opposite of Che. I am not sure he even could run. And after eating he smelled pretty bad.
    Jennifer’s house, with all the dogs, was just about the most wonderful place imaginable. I sometimes missed the Farm, of course, but being at Jennifer’s was like living full-time at a dog park.
    A woman came to see Che after a few days and took him with her when she left. “It’s wonderful, what you do. I think if I tried to foster dogs I’d wind up keeping all of them,” said the woman who took Che.
    Che was going to have a new life with a new person, I realized, and