Sometimes I go with her to the shelter, and that is how I heard about the job that she lost. She said a dove was walking north on Madison Avenue, walking with a limp, when it turned left at 73rd Street and entered Pierre Deux. Karen was on her way to a job interview, but she followed the bird into the store. The bird was hurt, that was clear, so Karen said she wrapped it in a remnant of French challis and took it to the hospital known as the Mayo Clinic for animals. She said she wrote out a check for the bird’s costly treatment, then put it in a cab for Brooklyn where there is a sanctuary for such cases. She took the driver’s number, told him the person at the other end would call her when he arrived.

She said she missed her interview. So did this make her compassionate, Karen asked, or just ambivalent?

Banker had gone from a sit to lying down. The dog’s eyes remained on Karen the entire time. When she finished speaking, he thumped his tail.

“Good boy,” Karen said.

A young woman came over to the pen with a large plastic scoop. She opened Banker’s kennel and removed his dish, filled it with food and put it back in the part of the kennel that was unroofed and open to the air. The woman left to tend the other dogs, and Karen spoke to Banker; she said it was exhausting to always have two jobs—your job, and the job of being able to do your job in the first place.

A blue jay dove into Banker’s bowl and flew off with a kibble from his dinner.

“How do you do both?”

My guess was you worked twice as hard, but I wasn’t the one she asked.

Only Warren can pull her out of a mood. Last night she told us she was going to go look at a litter of puppies. Warren told her there was no such thing as “just looking” at puppies.

“Often you do see puppies that just aren’t cute enough,” he said. Then he wondered aloud what kind of puppy did we think Karen could pass up. “Let’s see,” he said in Karen’s voice, “all the internal organs are on the outside? I can live with that.”

“I like golden retrievers,” Karen said.

“You don’t think they’ve kind of got that Stepford thing going?” Warren said.

Warren is pronounced Warn, or Worn.

You know how most of us don’t say things in a memorable way? The way everything sounds already handled by everyone else? But Warren says, when he is angry, that he’s as mad as all outdoors. He says do I want to meet him after dinner and chew the rug? He says he can’t always follow the threat of my conversation.

When Chatty sees Warren in her old school dorm, she says she nearly calls out, “Man on the floor!”

I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you’d find in a cartoon balloon.