Abbie thought it was fitting that the twins were the ones who found the Rossos’ pet. They were the biggest animal lovers of all, and they were also the ones who were most concerned about homeless animals. It happened two days after Mrs. Rosso had announced her surprising news and not long before she was to drive Abbie and her brothers and sisters to the pound.

“Faustine! Gardenia!” called Mrs. Rosso. “Would one of you run to the end of the driveway and get the mail, please?”

The twins went together, of course, talking excitedly about what kind of dog they might find at the pound.

“Shh!” Dinnie said as they neared the mailbox.

Faustine stopped talking. She thought she heard a tiny squeak. Then the noise came again, more loudly. “Mew.”

The twins looked at each other. They ran to the ditch along the side of the road. “Kitty!” they called. “Here, kitty!”

“Mew. Mew!”

It didn’t take long for the twins to find a tiny gray-and-white kitten huddled into a little ball near a puddle in the ditch. The kitten was wet and dirty and trembling.

“I’ll get it!” cried Dinnie, sliding into the ditch.

“Be careful,” said Faustine. “Don’t let it bite you.”

Dinnie approached the kitten slowly, talking to it in whispers. “You poor thing,” she kept saying. “It’s okay.”

The kitten was too miserable to try to run away from Dinnie. It allowed itself to be picked up and then to be handed to Faustine before Dinnie scrambled out of the ditch. The twins took turns carrying it back to the farmhouse.

“Oh, good. You’re back,” said Mrs. Rosso, as they opened the screen door and came into the kitchen. “Let me just look at the mail, and then we’ll leave for the pound.”

“Oops,” said Dinnie, as she realized they’d forgotten the mail.

“Oops,” said Faustine.

And at that moment Mrs. Rosso saw the kitten. She gasped.

“We found it in the ditch,” said Faustine.

“Someone must have abandoned it,” Dinnie added.

“Well, for heaven’s sake. Let’s get it cleaned up.” Mrs. Rosso set up an assembly line to wash, dry, feed, and cuddle the kitten.

By the time the kitten’s fur· was clean and its tummy was full, it was purring contentedly in Abbie’s lap, eyes half-closed. The other kids had gathered.

“I guess we’re going to keep it, aren’t we?” said Abbie, glad that, for once, there was no question about whether they were allowed to.

“You want the kitten for your pet?” Mrs. Rosso asked. “This is it, you know. One baby, one pet. We aren’t going to get a dog in addition to the kitten.”

The Rosso kids held a silent meeting with their eyes. The kitten wasn’t the same as a beagle or a poodle, and certainly not the same as a Doberman pinscher, but they wanted to keep it. After all, it was homeless, too. What did it matter whether they gave a home to a dog from the pound or a kitten from the ditch? Besides, who could turn away the rumbly ball of fur that was dozing in Abbie’s lap?

“We want the kitten,” Abbie said, speaking for her brothers and sisters as well as herself.

Mrs. Rosso nodded. “It’s settled, then. Who wants to drive into town to buy a litter box and some food?”

Everyone did, but in the end Hannah, Hardy, Bainbridge, Jan, and Ira went, while Abbie, Candy, Woody, and the twins stayed with the kitten. They cuddled it and talked to it until it was exhausted and fell sound asleep, its front paws hanging over one side of Abbie’s lap and its tail hanging over the other.

The kitten was wide awake by the time the others returned with two bags of cat supplies. As Abbie watched it frisk daringly around the kitchen, she thought, You’d never know that just a few hours ago this kitty was lost in a muddy ditch. Now it looks as if it owns our kitchen.

“Come here, kitty,” said Jan. “You want to play with your toys? Look what we bought for you.” She tossed a rubber mouse across the floor, and the kitten went skidding after it.

“Hey, it likes its toy!” exclaimed Jan.

“We better decide whether the kitten is a boy or a girl,” said Candy. “Then we won’t have to call it ‘it.’”

“We need a name for it, too,” said Hannah.

Dinnie picked the kitten up and examined it. “I can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl,” she said. “It’s too young. We’ll have to wait a couple of weeks until it’s older.”

“How are we going to name it?” asked Hardy. “We have to know whether it’s a boy or a girl.”

Bainbridge frowned. “Let’s go outside and think about this. It’s too hot in here.”

Jan scooped the kitten up, and she and the rest of the kids marched through the screen door, which closed with a bang behind the last one, and out to the oak tree where Sally was buried. They sat in an untidy group. Hardy untied one of his sneakers and dangled the lace in front of the kitten, watching it bat it back and forth.

Abbie gazed around at her brothers and sisters and thought that they didn’t look a thing like the New York kids who’d moved to the country almost a year ago. Those kids had been worried about pollution and muggers and cockroaches. They hadn’t known a rose from a daffodil. The kids sitting under the oak tree were relaxed, slightly dirty (except for Ira), and not worried about much at all, except maybe bee stings. Or whose room the new baby would sleep in. They’d raised a nestful of birds, survived a snowstorm, and discovered a secret room in their house.

It was thoughts such as those that gave Abbie the courage to say, “I’ve got an idea about naming the kitten.”

“What?” asked the others.

“I was just thinking that the ten of us haven’t turned out too badly. Think of everything that’s happened this year. We started at new schools and made new friends and had adventures. And we did it all with names like Dagwood and Calandra.”

“And Bainbridge,” added Bainbridge.

“Right,” said Abbie. “So maybe Mom knows what she’s doing. Or maybe not. But I think we should take the kitten’s name from What Shall We Name the Baby? That way we won’t have to argue over the name, and Mom would be flattered if we used the book. And it would be nice to flatter her since she did finally let us get a pet.”

The Rosso kids considered this.

At last Bainbridge said importantly, “Abbie, do you move that we name the kitten from What Shall We Name the Baby?”

“Yes,” replied Abbie. “I do.”

“I second the motion,” said Candy.

“All those in favor say aye,” instructed Bainbridge.

“Aye,” said Abbie, Bainbridge, Candy, Woody, Hardy, Faustine, Dinnie, Hannah, Ira, and Jan.

“Those opposed?”

Silence.

“Go get the book,” said Bainbridge.

Abbie retrieved the book from the house and opened it to the L pages.

“Hey,” said Candy, “what if Mom and Dad have another kid, after Kelly or Keegan? Or what if they have twins again? We better not use up either one of the twelfth L names.”

“That’s true,” Abbie agreed. “But then we’re not really using Mom’s system.”

“We don’t know how many kids might be in our family one day, though,” Candy pointed out.

“Well, we know one thing. There probably won’t be twenty-six,” Hannah said. “Let’s start at the back of the book and give the kitten a Z name.”

“The last Z name,” Ira added. “Whatever it is. There probably aren’t very many of them.”

“Okay,” said Abbie. “We’ll look up the last boy’s Z name and the last girl’s Z name. When we know what the kitten is, we’ll give it the right one.”

Abbie opened the book gingerly. She was almost afraid to look. “Well,” she said, “guess what. If it’s a girl — Zsa Zsa.”

“Zsa Zsa! That’s cute!” exclaimed Jan.

“And if it’s a boy — Zuriel.”

“Oh, weird,” muttered Hannah.

“Not weirder than Eberhard,” said Hardy.

“What’s going on out here?”

The Rosso kids looked up to see their mother crossing the farmyard.

“Mom, meet Zsa Zsa or Zuriel,” said Abbie, holding up the kitten.

She explained how they had arrived at the names, and Mrs. Rosso began to look teary-eyed. “What a nice idea,” she said.

“Don’t get too carried away,” Faustine cautioned her, grinning. “If you and Dad have twins again, then we get to have a dog, too.”

“Oh, brother,” said Mrs. Rosso, shaking her head.

“Let’s see. A dog,” said Abbie. “What would we name it?”

“Second to last Y names,” Hardy replied.

“And those,” said Abbie, thumbing through the book, “are Yvette and Yule.”

“Yule!” cried Hardy, choking. “You know something? I’m glad I’m named Eberhard!”

“And I’m glad I’m named Dagwood,” said Woody.

“Well, I’ll tell you something,” Mrs. Rosso spoke up. “I’d love all you kids no matter what you were named.”

“Even if we were John and Jim and Sue and Sally and not in alphabetical order?” asked Ira.

“Even then.”

Ira sighed with contentment. His brothers and sisters turned look-alike freckled faces to Zsa Zsa or Zuriel and smiled at their first pet.

Ten kids, one pet, and a new baby on the way. Mrs. Rosso sighed with contentment, too.