Excerpt

Excerpt from Chapter One

Falling in Love

I met Buckley that spring of  2005. I had been managing the Middleburg Animal Hospital for seven years at that point. For the first four of those seven years, I had shared my office with Virginia, a beautiful tortoiseshell cat who had adopted me as her person and loved me utterly and completely. After she died in 2002, the office felt empty, but the right cat to take over this important position had not come along—until that spring day, when I walked into the kennel area of the hospital. Liz, our groomer, was brushing out a scruffy looking mixed breed dog, and we chatted for a while.
    “Have you seen the cute little tortie in the back?” Liz asked. Everybody at the animal hospital knew I was partial to tortoiseshell cats. There was something about the beautiful coloring and the distinct personality that is typical for these cats that appealed to me.
   “No, I haven’t,” I responded. “Where is she?”
Liz pointed to the bank of cages at the very back of the kennel, and I went to see Buckley for the first time. And I fell in love. Hard. And fast.
 
She was a small cat, and she immediately came to the front of the cage and rubbed up against the bars. When I unlatched the door to her cage to pet her, she practically threw herself at me—something I came to call “full body love” as I got to know her better and realized that this was one of the many ways she would demonstrate her affection. This little cat loved with her entire being. It took several minutes of talking to her and petting her before I even noticed her deformed left hind leg. It bent upward at the knee at a ninety degree angle. Our veterinarians were unable to determine whether this was a congenital birth defect or whether it was an old injury that had never healed right. It certainly did not seem to bother her, nor did it slow her down. She barely had a limp, and she used the knee of the bent leg to push off when she ran and jumped. Her “disability” definitely was a non-issue for her—she didn’t know the meaning of the word. After a while, I didn’t notice it anymore, either. It was just part of who she was, and I was always surprised when people asked about it.