When Dorthea Polanco’s uterus finally flipped over and refused to house any more pregnancies she started acquiring pets. She had given birth to six children in almost as many years and now discovered that animals didn’t require as much recovery time.

At first she tried to pretend the animals were for the kids, but they wouldn’t let her get away with it.

“Mom! That disgusting guinea pig of Bobby’s was in my laundry hamper!”

“It’s not my guinea pig, I never asked for it. I wanted an X-box!”

The house was too small for six children; they did not want to share it with any more living creatures, no matter how small and fluffy.

Still, Dorthea found herself pulling over in front of Bob’s Mega-Menagerie several times a week. Sometimes she just looked, indulging in the strange pull she felt from the needy eye of a parakeet or a Ruby Barb, a look that seemed to her to say that she was the only one who could save them, the only one who could fulfill their tiny fates. But quite often she walked out with a clammy plastic bag or cardboard box and could almost feel the thrum of life that she had taken upon herself to support.

She bought fish and bunnies, guinea pigs and mice. She bought a snake and more mice to feed it with.

“This house is starting to smell like a barn,” her daughter Althea said, wrinkling her pretty nose.

Barn Dorthea thought and the next day she came home with three baby chicks and a book on how to build a backyard chicken coop.

When she became fairly certain that her husband Martin was having, or about to have, an affair with a woman he had apparently met in the French cooking class he had taken at the local Sur la Table, she bought him a Boston Terrier puppy.

She was the one who took care of it however, although she never had the time to train it properly and it became very naughty.