Growing up in the faded mining town of Oak Hill, population 7,200, Hess was what she calls “a late bloomer.” She briefly married, she says, and didn’t come into her “gayness” until her 20s. Over dinner one night at Hardee’s, she said to her mother, “Mama, I think I’m gay.” Her mother said, “So?” Her father, a retired coal miner, was similarly accepting, if a bit worried. People can be so cruel, we don’t want you to get hurt, her parents said. But Hess was laid back about her sexuality. “I was never out there and about.”

In any case, it wasn’t easy to meet women in Oak Hill; the closest gay bar is an hour away. “We’re in a small area of the world; trust me, there ain’t that many of us,” Hess said. Highway signs pointing to Oak Hill, with its strip malls and dilapidated downtown, and Fayetteville, the county seat next door, neatly encapsulate the towns’ respective personalities. Fayetteville is a “Coolest Small Town,” so named by Budget Travel magazine in 2006 for its white-water rafting and Americana chic; Oak Hill is “Home of Marian McQuade, Founder of National Grandparents’ Day.”

Image Cheryl Hess (left) and Kathryn Kutil with TiCasey, their daughter (pending). Credit... Jeff Riedel for The New York Times

When Hess, who earned her G.E.D. after quitting school in 11th grade, found out that Kutil was the Fayetteville nursing home’s director, she thought, Oh, God, I’m so out of my league. But their connection was immediate, and they’ve been together ever since. Two years into the relationship, they had several rescued cats and dogs, but both wanted children. After artificial insemination failed, Hess suggested they adopt through the foster-care system. “She’s always on the underdog’s side,” Kutil told me when I visited in March. There were certainly plenty of children who might need a home. West Virginia holds approximately 4,200 children in custody; nearly one-third live in group homes or institutions.

“I didn’t want to do it right out of the chute,” Kutil admitted. In her 20s, she had a job as a foster-care and adoption worker and was often saddled with twice the caseload she could handle; she quit after five years, calling it “hell, chaos.” “I knew there’d be days that were absolutely insane,” she said. But Kutil and Hess’s options for building a family were limited. Even though an estimated 65,500 adopted children already live with a gay parent, and lesbian and bisexual women are almost twice as likely as heterosexual women to report they have lived with and cared for a non-birth child, not all adoption agencies are open to same-sex couples. A 1999-2000 survey of adoption agencies found that only 60 percent accepted applications from gays. Similarly, not all countries permit same-sex couples to adopt internationally. But perhaps, Kutil and Hess thought, a match could be made between a couple like themselves and foster kids in need.

So in April 2006, Kutil and Hess expanded their three-bedroom home to five bedrooms and furnished it with bunk beds. They traded in their Jeep and their sports car for a minivan and an S.U.V. And that fall, after screening and training, they welcomed their first child, a kindergartner who arrived with a garbage bag of clothes and stayed for several months before her propensity to kick and abuse the couple’s dogs and cats led them to ask that she be placed elsewhere. Their next foster children, a sibling pair, Renee, then 9, and Ray, 7, seemed a better fit. Born to a father described by Child Protective Services as “low-functioning,” Renee and Ray had been passed along from aunt to uncle to neighbor, growing up in campers and tents, sometimes bathing under a hose. Their mother, Renee told Hess, used to “get mad and sit upon us. I’d lose my breath because she was a little chunky.” Their father eventually brought them in to social services and, according to Hess, said: “I just can’t do it. I can’t give them what they need.”

To Kutil and Hess, Renee and Ray were a godsend. Though the couple had always prayed for a baby, they were happy to care for whatever children came their way. They had decided on fostering, in the end, not only to find a family, Kutil says, but also to “do some good for children who needed a chance.” Renee and Ray were clearly in need. “We knew from the start we wanted to adopt them both,” Hess said. “We had our little family.”