CHAPTER 1:

There was no jetway at the small Texas airport. Richard Dickstein, Jr., D.V.M. walked down the airplane’s steps into a blast of hot wind. He didn’t want to be back in this small part of nowheresville, Texas. He didn’t want to be working with his father at Hertz & Dickstein Large Animal Medicine.

But due to an unexpected dip in consumer meat-eating habits due to a vegan celebrity chef, the job at Cargill that Dick Dickstein thought he had an offer in hand for had vaporized entirely. Having put all of his eggs into a totally non-egg-laying-animal basket, Dick had no choice to return home to his smug dad and the farm town he hoped he would never see again.

And then there was Meggy. Dick hated that he was so ambivalent about her. They’d been together for what, six years now? And she wasn’t pushing for a ring or even a commitment to propose -- but that just made Dick feel worse. Meggy deserved someone who felt more for her than Dick felt about his new job; that is, better than not having it at all. Dick was comfortable with Meggy, sure, but he couldn’t honestly say there was love there. Dick didn’t even think she loved him so much as wanted a human connection too much to try for better. But maybe that was projection. She seemed happy enough getting off the plane into the wave of sauna air from over the scrubland. She’d quit her job doing some sort of ad sales for an internet company -- not that it was really a job to keep; he could see that it was wearing the edges off of her chipper demeanor -- to follow Dick into cow country.

Dick wondered if this could work, if he could settle down with Meggy and make a life for himself looking after his neighbors’ kids’ farm animals like his dad, with kids and a mortgage and-