In julia’s second year of medical school, I lost focus. She went off to the hospital and I stayed home with Kiki, our long-legged Border collie mutt. I didn’t cook or clean or bring in much money, and my appearance, even in my own generous self-conception, had declined in recent months from “cover of Infidels Dylan” to “sweating and confused at the end of Live Aid Dylan.” But the dog made me feel okay about things. She forgave my negligence of her grooming and exercise, and repaid my shoddy fathering with wild delight every time I survived a trip to the bathroom. I counted each hour she stayed alive as a major achievement, a line on my karmic CV.

My actual CV was a different story. I’d dropped out of a Ph.D. program in English literature after only a year, feeling, inaccurately, that my brilliance could not be contained by the tedious expectations of my peers and professors in New Haven. Julia and I had been flailing away at a long-distance relationship during our respective first years in graduate school, so declaring that my true calling lay as a practitioner of literature rather than a student allowed me to move to Virginia and pester her up close. A nice thing about my life was that I had some money left from when my grandfather died. He’d loved me, for the most part because I’d enjoyed hearing his intimate and unsettling stories, and continued listening long after my sisters refused to countenance them. The money wouldn’t last forever, though, as my mother never tired of telling me. Julia would make plenty eventually, if medical school ever ended, and if—big if—I didn’t drive her away with my piteous dallying. I was waiting, I guess, for the unforeseen motivating force that would launch me screaming into my thirties. Please stop me if you’ve heard any of this before.

One morning, I walked Kiki to the vet’s office to pick up her summer flea and tick medicine, a task I’d put off until she was covered in fleas and ticks. While I got rung up at the front desk and Kiki pawed desperately at a cage of orphaned kittens, the vet came in from the back. He’d been our point man at the clinic for the almost-year we’d had our pup. He looked about fifteen, with puffy cheeks, blond bangs, and unfixed teeth. His white coat engulfed him like a trainee priest’s cassock. It wasn’t clear that he knew anything of the veterinary arts, but he was the only male besides me that Kiki didn’t growl at, so Julia and I figured he had to have something going for him. Mostly, he was the closest vet to our house.

“Hi, Kiki,” the boy vet said. “Hi, Kiki’s owner.”