Belonging and the search for home and family are at the center of the title story, “Fatted Calf Blues. ” Here, a woman hitchhikes home to Alberta to see her dying father. At a truck stop near Dauphin, Manitoba she meets a fellow traveller who radically changes the course of her homecoming. “The Darkened Door” explores the nature of desire when a couple arrives home to discover an anonymous love note on their apartment door and can’t help but be intrigued. How ideals can become delusions is explored in “The Animal Room” where a university caretaker’s smooth operation of his Animal Room is upset shy medical student forces him to examine a lost part of himself.