“Mama, don’t make him go away. He came back when nobody else did.”
I had no idea what she meant.
I only knew that at eleven that morning, my sister had left my daughter alone at a bus stop in downtown Memphis.
And sometime during the afternoon, a homeless dog had decided to stay with her.
I didn’t know his name.
I didn’t know where he had come from.
I certainly didn’t know that the number printed on a tiny microchip inside his neck would lead us to a woman who had been crying over that dog for more than two years.
At that moment, all I wanted was to hold my little girl.
My name is Anika Williams.
I was thirty-four years old that October, raising Mira by myself in a small rented duplex on the east side of Memphis.
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