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party guests. Amanda was still clutching her wounded five-year-old, and the others were openly staring.
    â€œIt’s fine,” I assured them. “We’re fine. Just . . . kids being silly!” I went back to sit down with them, casually popping a grape in my mouth.
    Amanda put her hand over mine. “You might not want to callhim an alien. You know, in front of people. They might get the wrong idea.”
    I smiled and agreed, because I didn’t know how to explain that it’s easier to think of Silas as a perfect little alien with different social norms than a developmentally delayed human child who wreaks havoc at parties.
    Maria, who is from England, seemed expert at changing the subject in an awkward situation. “Did you want any beef?” she interjected. “We’re slaughtering a steer this weekend. It’s six hundred pounds of meat, so we’re looking for someone to go halves with.”
    This gave me pause. I turned to her, noting her long, shapely legs and firm upper arms. She didn’t look like a person who handled beef by the hundreds of pounds. “
Three hundred pounds?
” I repeated. “That’s a lot of cow.”
    â€œWell, it’s for the whole year,” she explained. “You just chuck it in the deep freeze, then you eat it the rest of the year.”
    I thought about this. “But isn’t that, like, six pounds of beef every week?”
    â€œYeah, but it’s great meat. Grass-fed! You’ll love it.”
    I wasn’t sure how I could backpedal out of buying half a steer’s worth of heart attack, but in the end, I didn’t have to. Because that’s when Kowhai bit the baby.
    â€œ
Ow!
” Lucy screamed. “
Mama
!
” All the mothers instinctively scrambled to their feet, and there was Amanda’s husband, Nick, dangling Lucy over Kowhai’s head. She looked like bait.
    â€œ
Kowhai!
” I roared. “
No biting!
”
    Kowhai ran to me looking guilty, her tail between her legs.
    â€œIt’s fine,” Amanda assured me. “Don’t worry about it. Lucy’s fine. She’s just a little drama queen.”
    I cast a wary glance at Nick, who had his eyes locked on Kowhai.With his arsenal of international killing skills, Nick could probably have dispatched our dog with a flick of his wrist. At this point, we’d stabbed one child in the eye, shat on his lawn, and savaged the birthday girl with our German shepherd. If he chose to go Krav on us, we’d have had only ourselves to blame.
    â€œYou’re sweet,” I told Amanda. “But I think it’s time to go home.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    TEDDY BEAR CAMELS
    A few weeks later, Peter went for a hike in a local nature preserve, leaving me home with the kids. And that’s when the cow got out again. I checked on her in the morning, when I went out to feed the dogs and the chickens. She was just standing there in her paddock, looking innocent and chewing her cud. But then I took the kids to the grocery store. And when we got back, she was nowhere to be found.
    Now, if your chickens get out, it makes a charming rural tableau. And if your dog gets out, it’s a mild annoyance. But when your cow is staggering down the highway snacking on daisies and dodging sedans, it’s a big fucking problem. If the cow causes an accident, you’re legally liable, not to mention the possible carnage.
    Most of the time, we got her back in her paddock. Peter and I would go running into the garden with long sticks of bamboo, yelling “
Baaaaa!
” and “
Go, cow, go!
” which are technical terms for cow herding. Most of the time, this worked. But sometimes Luckywould disappear for days, and we could only hope she was staying away from moving vehicles.
    As far as I was concerned, she could stay gone, but we had promised Katya and Derek we’d keep her safe. And there was the unpleasant chance she could be hit by a