By Nancy Coffelt
A girl lives with her mom part of the time and her dad the rest, and wherever she goes, her dog Fred comes too.
The girl telling this lives at her mom's house part of the time and her dad's the rest. Fred, her dog, goes with her both directions. She walks you through the differences plainly, one house is like this, the other is like that, and then she gets to the one thing that doesn't change: Fred, asleep on her bed in either place. Then the trouble shows up, and it has nothing to do with the divorce. It's the dog. Fred barks at the neighbor's poodle at Mom's. Fred eats socks at Dad's. And each parent, on their own, lands on the same verdict: Fred is a problem, Fred can't stay. So the girl digs in and says the line the book is named for. Fred doesn't stay with either of you. Fred stays with me. And because they have to, her two parents figure out how to share one dog across two houses. Tricia Tusa's drawings are loose and wispy and funny, and they keep the whole thing gentle.
Putting the dog at the center is what makes this one work. The girl never has to announce that she feels pulled between two homes, because Fred carries it for her, he's the thing that travels, the thing that stays the same, the proof that her life doesn't get reshuffled every few days. A child listening may pick that up without anyone spelling it out. And then the book does the harder thing. It lets the parents disagree, out loud, about something that matters to their daughter, and it doesn't pretend they've patched things up by the end. They just solve the one problem in front of them. That's a more honest picture of two households than a book where everyone is kind all the way through, and for a lot of children it reads as a relief rather than a worry. The girl asked for one thing that mattered, and both parents came around.