Early on a cold morning, Jake and I walk along the bike path. Jake stops, strains. In the thin scrub and trees to our right, a rabbit hunches, panting. Its entire left flank is red and raw. There is no other motion. The rabbit shakes, breathing breathing. I lead Jake away. In the afternoon when we walk by again, the rabbit is dead on its side. Again I lead Jake away. It’s a cold afternoon. The cold feels like it will never go away.

When Otis was young, he could pluck birds out of the air he was so fast. We’d walk the bottom of the yard and startle sparrows out of the evergreens and he would leap up and come down with a bird in his mouth before I could even say no, his tail wagging, squirmingly delighted with himself.

Sometimes Jake is seized by “the puppyness.” He takes the leash in his mouth, he leaps, he races in circles around me. It’s scary, the frantic energy that wells up in him. I try to remain calm and centered. I tell myself I can let go of the leash if he gets too crazy. I tell him no, shh, sit. I tell him I could let go.

Otis has an inoperable tumor. It’s pressing against his bladder. His back legs are swelling. He has weeks, maybe a month. He shakes sometimes with the pain. I learn this when my ex-wife, Nikki, tells me. We’ve been divorced for two months. Otis lives with her now. The next night when I see him, while she teaches, I lie down next to him and stroke him while he trembles. I cry when I take him outside.

We got Otis a few months after Nikki’s third miscarriage. We wanted to keep trying, but we didn’t know if we’d be able to have children. I knew in the pound that Otis was the one. He sat when the others barked. He wagged his tail when I put my fingers near the cage. He was afraid but he was calm. Part pit bull, part boxer. We didn’t commit to him that day, a Saturday, and all that night and Sunday I was in a fever to return, so afraid someone else would see what I had seen. But he was still there Monday. That was the end of January. A year later, on January 11th, our daughter Zoe would be born. Two years and ten days after that, Amanda.

When we brought Zoe home from the hospital, Nikki burst into tears. She was so afraid, she said. She sat on the edge of the bed. What if we couldn’t do this? We had just put Zoe in her bassinette, on top of our dresser. I brimmed with it. I knelt beside her. I know we can do this, I said. I have never been more sure of anything.

I had promised Amanda, and Zoe too, but especially Amanda, that we would get a dog for the house I’d moved into during the separation and divorce. I told her I was only waiting until my teaching schedule lightened next semester. When the fall semester ended, she pointed to the calendar. Time to go to the shelter. We had researched dogs, but when they saw Jake, they knew he was the one. Part huskie, but brindled and short-haired and bat-eared: great dane? Greyhound? Cool blue eyes and a mischievous mouth. The only dog I ever owned that let me sleep late. I’ve had him two months and ten days.

After Nikki and I separated, I rented a house on the main drag of town. On weeks when I didn’t have the girls, I’d sit on the porch and watch traffic. I was close enough to see faces. I’d never lived alone before. My bedroom was next to the porch. At night, I’d sometimes hear the thudthud of a car with the stereo cranked. Sometimes police cars and ambulances careened past. Some mornings, I’d wake up and not know what day it was. Where I was. Waking had the dislocation of dreams. With my eyes still closed, I’d know if it had rained by the boundless shush of wet tires on wet pavement. This was before Jake. Before I had something to tether me to the world on the weeks without Zoe and Amanda.

Before Zoe, Otis and I used to take naps on a very long brown couch that was second-hand when we got it. Two moves later, the springs were unruly. But we would still stretch out the length of it and doze. When Zoe was born, sometimes I would hold her until she fell asleep, then carefully lie down on the couch with her on my chest, Otis stretching out beside me. Until the springs got dangerous, we would nap like that often. I still remember the way we drifted in and out of sleep, the way we breathed, the rise and fall of it.

What Amanda wants more than anything is for Jake to sleep the night on her bed. Usually, the weeks they stay with Nikki, he sleeps on mine, curled up in a tight ball. We three named him Jake together. I liked Jack, and Zoe liked Jacob Black, and Amanda lit on Jake. I tell Amanda that sometimes, when you stop wanting something too fiercely, it comes to you unbidden. And one night not long after, he sleeps on her bed until 11:45. It’s a start, I tell her. He loves you, you know. She knows. But she thinks he loves me better.

I didn’t want you to get another dog, Nikki told me once, because that would mean that we were really over. You could never bring a new dog back into our old house with Otis there. She said this before I had gotten Jake. But she knew how much Amanda and Zoe wanted another dog. She knew it was coming. Knowing what it meant to her, I put it off as long as I could. I did. But I had made a promise to them, too. And it was the promise I felt I could keep.

This morning I took Jake to Joe Glik Park, which has fields, a pond, a dog run. It’s February still, sunny today but so cold still. Five or six fat bluebirds alit on the fence of the dog run, startling and bright and unafraid. They followed us back through the fields to the car. I took Jake off the leash. I didn’t know what he’d do. He raced me forward and back, but he came when I called. And sat when I clipped on his leash.

This afternoon I left Jake in his crate and went to visit Otis. Nikki covers his back legs with warm, wet towels. I stroked him, kneaded his ears. I told him how much I loved him, and listened to Zoe and Amanda bicker and banter over lunch. He’s still Otis, Nikki said. He still wants their scraps. And he did. He still does. He’s still Otis.

Why do we take things close to our hearts, why do we love? We know the dogs we take in as puppies will grow old, will get sick, will know pain, will die. We know that we will outlive them, that they will be seized by a kind of suffering that we can never lift. Why do we marry, why do we have children? Why do we love at all? When you lose love it mauls your heart. It bloodies you. And yet, again and again, we choose to love. Again and again. Why do we choose to love, again and again and again?