Whenever I say that, I always think back to this one picture that we took that hangs on my moms’ bedroom wall. It’s all of our hands in a circle, with our fingers almost touching. Mama’s light, freckled complexion, like the pale pink of rose petals; Mom’s always-smooth, rich-umber-and-sepia skin; with me and Noah in the middle, gold and sand, like shades of a rainbow.

I start to get impatient, wondering if I should just get up and go back to my old spot at the other end of the table. Maybe Macy is just one of those people who doesn’t understand. But finally, after a long pause, she says, “Well, I don’t have any moms, so I think you’re pretty lucky to have two.”

“I’ve never thought about it like that,” I tell her, but her eyes suddenly have this faraway look, like she’s thinking about something. “Why don’t you have a mom?” I wonder out loud. “I mean, if that’s okay to ask?”

Macy squirms in her seat and shakes her head. “I don’t really wanna talk about it.”

“Okay,” I say.

There’s a pause, but Macy comes back to the conversation. “I do have a dad, and my grandma—my sobo, I call her.” She explains, “That’s ‘grandmother’ in Japanese.”

“Gramps—that’s what I call my grandpa,” I offer. “He just moved in with us.”

She nods and smiles like she understands.

I kind of want to ask her more questions, like what’s it like to have a dad and a grandma, or does her grandma have trouble remembering things and get confused at night too? But I’m sure those are the kinds of questions that Moms would say are too personal or rude to ask someone you barely know, so I keep talking about Dewey instead.

“They think she’s mean and dangerous because of how she was acting at the shelter, but she’s not,” I say, instead of asking any of those too-personal questions. “She was just scared. But I’m going to find a way to get her out of there, I just don’t exactly know how.” I reach into my backpack to pull out the flyer I worked on last night. “I’m calling it Code Name: Lost and Found.”

Macy reads the flyer and rubs the picture of Dewey with her finger like she’s petting her head.

“I thought if I could make a ‘lost dog’ poster and give it to my mom to bring to the shelter, it could at least buy her some more time,” I continue. “But I don’t have a phone number to include, so I don’t think that will work either.”

“She’s adorable,” Macy coos, still touching Dewey’s face in the picture. “I wish I could adopt her.”

“Wait a minute,” I say, wheels turning in my brain. “What if you could adopt her?”