“Anabelle needs a foster home,” Topaz explained. “She can stay here a while longer, but not forever.”
“She isn’t going to a forever home yet? She can’t get adopted?”
“Not in her condition.” Topaz looked at me as if waiting for me to catch on.
I was oblivious to what she was trying to get across. “What are you saying?”
Sharon gave me a look that implied she also thought I was rather dim. “Anabelle is about three weeks along. In two or three weeks, she’ll be more than ready to go to a home where she can have more personal care.” The dog rolled onto her back, and my eyes widened at the sight of her enlarged nipples.
She was pregnant! Topaz wanted us to foster a second pregnant dog?
“I hope you don’t mind,” Topaz said. “You don’t mind, do you? I thought it’d be perfect since the puppies will be leaving. It just feels so amazing to foster, and to help a dog give birth. I thought it’d be perfect timing. The puppies leave and Anabelle comes in… That’ll make it a little easier to give up the other puppies.”
My heart felt like it was about to burst. “That would be amazing,” I said. “Of course I want to foster her.”
Topaz turned to Sharon now. “We’ll take her in three weeks, when we adopt out the other dogs.”
Sharon nodded and wrote that down on her clipboard.
“By the way, while we’re here, I wanted to make it official. Heidi and I would like to adopt Diamond permanently.”
“I’ll get you the paperwork,” the lady said. “Just don’t fall in love with this second dog, too, or you’ll have more dogs than you know what to do with. It’s the foster parents’ curse. Happens all the time.”
Topaz took my hand. “We’re going to have another dog,” she said softly.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “A lot of other dogs.”
And she leaned in and kissed me, right in front of the entire animal shelter.
TWENTY-FIVE—TOPAZ
A few steps in front of us, Diamond pulled on her leash. She pressed her nose into the grass and paused, sniffing at the ground. A second later, she jumped up and spun around. She saw the approaching dog several seconds before we did.
“Oh,” I said. Heidi smirked, too. Diamond had discovered a miniature schnauzer, fluffy and gray and, apparently, excitable.
“She’s going to freak out,” I said softly.
“She’ll be okay. She’s smart enough to not…”
Before Heidi could finish her sentence, Diamond was in a tangle with the schnauzer. Their leashes wrapped around each other’s as they happily began to smell each other’s bums.
Heidi and I traded glances of amusement. The dogs were in seventh heaven, while we were going to go through hell getting them apart. We could’ve let them play together, but we needed to get back home.
The schnauzer’s owner, an elderly Asian lady with a young woman next to her, pointed at us. I let my hand drop from Heidi’s. Even without understanding whatever language she was speaking, the attention didn’t bother me. I couldn’t care less what anyone had to say about me and Heidi. What was important was getting Diamond to chill out.
It took us a minute to get Diamond’s leash free. I let go of the end and pulled it out from the other side. When I finished and stood up, the elderly lady had done the same with her dog.
She gave me a funny look as she pointed to Heidi, then to me. “Girlfriend? Girlfriend?”
Now I was getting more nervous. I reminded myself that no one’s opinion mattered but mine—not hers, not my parents’, not anybody’s. The thing was, I didn’t exactly have an answer to that question.
“We haven’t really talked about it,” Heidi said.
That seemed to be more than she could understand. “Girlfriend?”
Heidi scuffed her shoe on the ground. “No, not yet. It’s too early.”
She looked at me. “Wife?”
“No, no,” I said. I put my arm around Heidi and drew her in close. “Girlfriend.”
Heidi’s face was pale, and she looked like she was about to fall over. That was confusing enough. The senior woman looked at us, still in a way I couldn’t quite understand, and let loose with a rapid-fire stream of what I assumed was Chinese.
When she finished, the girl standing with her gave us an embarrassed look. “Sorry,” she said. “My grandmother says American lesbians are more beautiful than the ones in Taiwan, and that she goes to the Pride parade every year in Taipei. She wishes she could’ve been so open when she was younger.”
My jaw dropped slightly open, and I reached out to shake the woman’s hand. Of course, Diamond took that as a sign to go for the schnauzer again. It took several minutes of untangling leashes and cajoling dogs before we could get them apart.
“So, we made a new friend,” Heidi said as we started to walk again. “And, um… you’re my girlfriend.”
“Well, yeah. Obviously.”
Heidi gaped at me. “What do you mean, obviously? I’ve been agonizing since day one about not having a label on this!”
She had? “But we go on dates. We know each other’s friends. We celebrated our one month anniversary. I told my blog about you, not to mention my parents. We spend every night and all of our free time together. Hell, we live together!”
“I… I guess.” Heidi still looked faint. “I just thought we needed a conversation, an agreement…”
As far as I was concerned, everything was agreed to a long time ago. And we didn’t have time right now to discuss this over and over. “We better get home. We’re going to be late to meet Cindy and her friend.”
By the time we got back, they were already waiting at the door. “Nice of you to show up,” Cindy said.
I gave her a light punch on the shoulder. “You could’ve texted to let us know you were here. Come on in.”
Cindy’s friend Louis was a few years older than us. Apparently he worked with Cindy at her accounting firm. He sat stiffly, as if he had a lot of stress in his life.
If I was right, adopting a dog would be good for him. I just hoped Dorkbrain wouldn’t be too much for him.
“This is Diamond,” I said, watching as she sniffed each of our guests. “She’s not up for adoption, unfortunately.”
“And you only have one puppy left?”
“That’s right.” Four of them had already been adopted. It was difficult every time. Saying goodbye to them was enough to get me all emotional.
Only a few months ago, I would’ve been ashamed of myself for even admitting to being sad. Now there was one person I could open up to completely, and I found that I was more open in general as well.
“Meet Dorkbrain.” I placed the puppy in Louis’s hands. “You can rename her if you want, of course.” She walked around his cupped palms, looking from side to side, then promptly squatted down and urinated on him.
I gasped and went to catch the puppy in case he dropped her, but all he did was chuckle and take the tissues Heidi offered him. “Does this mean she’s claimed me?”
“It just might.”
I glanced at Heidi for her approval. We had veto power on any potential adopters, but I was quickly deciding Louis was the right kind of guy to raise a puppy. He was totally calm about getting peed on, and I could tell from the look in his eyes that he’d already fallen in love with Dorkbrain.
“Have you had dogs before?” I asked. “I know from experience, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to get used to.”
“This girl,” Heidi said, putting her arm around my shoulder. “She thought dogs were just cats that bark at first.”
I nudged her in the ribs, making her squeal. “I figured it out eventually.”
“So, do you want her?” Heidi asked.
Louis petted Dorkbrain, using the tip of one finger to stroke her head. “I definitely do. She seems to have taken a shine to me, and I could definitely use the company.”
“Perfect,” Heidi said. “That’s the last one of these idiot puppies. We can fina
lly get them out of here.”
“No, seriously,” I said, rolling my eyes at Heidi’s joking. “We need the space. Our next pregnant dog is going to be coming here soon. As soon as Dorkbrain moves out, actually.”
“I’m ready to take her right now.” Louis’s eyes shone with warmth.
“Then we’re ready to let her go.” My heart was heavy, but I knew it was the right thing to do. We couldn’t keep all of the beagis, or even one of them. Diamond would be more than enough. And with the foster system, we could help more and more dogs over time.
“I miss them already,” I said softly as we walked up the stairs. “So small and so cute.”
“I know,” Heidi said. “And I still miss Dipshit, too.”
“At least we had a couple of weeks with her. She was our little miracle.”
Diamond walked up the stairs behind us, panting and nosing at our legs. I reached down to pet her, then took Heidi’s hand and gave her a kiss.
“We’ll see you later, Diamond. Your mommies are going to be busy for a while.”
Nudging Diamond out of the way, I closed the door behind us.
EPILOGUE—HEIDI
“Get down here,” Topaz called. “Brownie’s going into labor!”
As soon as I heard her voice, I rushed out of our room. Getting downstairs took some effort in our new house. I had to pass the two other bedrooms and hurry down the winding staircase, avoiding tripping over toys or sports equipment all the while.
When I made it to the whelping box, Diamond was sniffing around with evident concern for our new foster dog. Even in her old age, she kept her sweet nature. She’d quickly befriended Brownie, as she did with all of our fosters. And she looked quite stylish in her diamond-patterned sweater—one of approximately fifty in her wardrobe.
Topaz scratched Brownie’s head, murmuring words of encouragement to the large border collie. “You’re going to be okay, don’t worry. We’ve done this a lot of times before.”
Brownie whined softly, and I put my hand on Topaz’s back. “She’ll be fine as long as she has you to soothe her. How many litters do you think we’ve fostered at this point?”
“I was thinking about that. This has to be our fifteenth.”
“No way.”
She counted them off, starting with Diamond. By the time she’d reached every finger of both hands, I was nodding along. “Spots, Naomi, Velvet…” She struggled to remember the fourteenth, but she was right—there were fifteen in total.
“It feels like we just started yesterday,” I said. “I never thought we’d get to this point.”
“Well, it has been ten years.”
It was also hard to believe it’d been that long. On the one hand, it felt like the two of us had been together forever. On the other, she was still new and exciting to me. I constantly discovered new things I hadn’t known about her—unique and amazing things. I fell more in love with this woman every day of my life.
Topaz leaned her head against my shoulder—a shoulder that was covered in her favorite horizontal stripes. I tended to dress how she liked these days. It got us a lot of likes on her blog, which grew by a million followers every week. Sometimes it felt like every woman in America got her style advice from Topaz.
The fashion sense my wife had imparted to me also helped me look nice at the job I’d held for the past five years. The Newbank Dog Rescue was a largely volunteer-run organization. When the single paid position opened up, all my years of giving my time freely had made me the obvious candidate to be CEO. The salary wasn’t high, but I got to do what I loved all day, every day.
“Okay, little mama,” I said to Brownie. “I think your first water sac is presenting. Are you ready for this?”
The dog moved around, still whining, but she accepted that something new and scary was going to happen to her. The first puppy came out smoothly, and after a few minutes, a second came as well. The third was the last, and Topaz and I held hands as we watched the new life come into the world.
Diamond sniffed at each new puppy, and we had to push her away. She was so curious about them that she didn’t want to leave.
A few minutes after everything was done, the front door opened and our two children stampeded inside.
“We didn’t miss the birth, did we?” Tobias demanded. He put down his skateboard, leaving mud on the ground, and Topaz moved to pick it up. Our boy was mature enough to walk his sister home from school, but apparently remembering to keep the floor clean was beyond him.
Jillian, a year younger than him at six, began to wail. “Mom! Mommy! I wanted to see. I told you I wanted to see.”
“I’m sorry, kids, but these things don’t happen on a schedule,” I explained. “The dog has to give birth when she has to give birth. You can’t choose what happens. We’re sorry you missed it, but at least now you’ll have new puppies to play with.”
That quieted our daughter, and she came to peer over the edge of the whelping box. Her little face lit up as she saw the tiny new creatures. “They’re smaller than the last ones.”
“Because the mother is smaller, and probably so was the daddy.”
“They can’t have two mommies?”
“No, they need a mommy and a daddy to be born, but then they can be adopted by anybody—just like your mom and I adopted you.”
She nodded solemnly. “I hope they’re going to have two mommies.”
“Why?”
“Because they’ll know they were special, and that the two mommies had to put in a lot of work to get them, and that their mommies are always going to love them no matter what.”
I restrained a laugh as she recited the explanation we had given her a million times for why she had two moms. We were going to have to explain another time that it only applied to humans.
Every word of that speech was completely true. Topaz and I were happy on our own, but we felt the need to help human children the way we helped puppies. Although we were both busy, it got to the point where not having kids felt like a void in our relationship.
We started off by fostering. Tobias and Jillian, our first pair of children, were siblings from an abusive household. They were only supposed to stay for a short time… except the foster parents’ curse struck again. We both fell for them, and we couldn’t imagine being without them anymore. And like Diamond, they’d blossomed after being removed from the terrible situation they were in.
As a side benefit, both our sets of parents had come around in a major way once the children came into the picture. Turned out being gay was a lot less of an issue when adorable grandkids were part of the package. Topaz’s parents doted on them as much as mine did.
“You’re not too late for the best part,” Topaz told the kids. “We still have to clean up the puppies and get them to nurse.”
Even Tobias wasn’t too cool to help with the puppies. “I can do that.”
“All right, now, here’s what we’re going to do…”
Topaz my hand as she began to explain. I smiled at her, suddenly flooded with gratitude.
I loved her, I loved our children, and I loved our life.
Nothing could have made me happier.
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Love,
Maria Jackson
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