Dogs Don't Lie by Clea Simon Page B

mother, probably.
    I opened a new can for her and watched her eat. Wallis would give me hell for that, I knew. For years, before she and I began talking, I’d kept her on a strict diet of one can a day, and she’d been an adult, too. Well, my plus-size tabby was asleep, and I had a kitten to console. When I carried her over to the mud room, she got right in, and did her business. One worry taken care of.
    “There you go.” I had questions, but the best way to get answers would be to put her small mind at ease. “I can see that you’re a good girl.”
    The kitten looked up at me. I could’ve sworn she was puzzled by my response. “
I didn’t do anything wrong!”
There was something else going on here that I wasn’t getting.
“I didn’t.”
    “What is it, kitten?” I picked her up with one hand. Quite a change from Wallis. But she turned from me. “Do you have a name, little girl?”
    “
I didn’t do anything.
” With that final iteration, she turned around twice, tucked her nose in her tail and fell asleep in my lap. Leaving me to wonder if this small animal had been taken from its mother too soon or been otherwise traumatized. And also, incidentally, how I could extract myself without disturbing her.
    ***
    I needn’t have worried overmuch. The kitten barely stirred when I lifted her onto the sofa and left her to get myself dressed. Happy’s. I’d been in once or twice since my return, checking out my options along with the bourbon. There hadn’t been many, as I recalled, and I’d ended up drinking in silence, finally settling on a bottle at home. Wallis made her feelings known about that, but since she had a thing for catnip we’d found our way to a truce.
    The bar looked a lot smaller than it had when I was growing up. It had been there forever, stuck on the end of our main street like a punctuation point. As a kid, I’d not paid it much mind. Maybe my dad had gone in there. He’d left before I’d become too clear on his habits. My mother pretended it didn’t exist, walking by its brick front with her nose up so high I always expected her to trip. There was parking in back; even in Beauville, downtown can get crowded. But she never parked there, preferring instead to walk a block down, even when it was raining.
    Happy’s wasn’t the only place in town that sold booze. You could even get a highball at the diner. But no place else was strictly for drinking. Or, if the rumors were to be believed, drinking and cards. Most nights after Happy locked the front door, he left the back open, people said. All-night games for big money drew out-of-towners long before we had the jogging paths.
    I should have hated the place. I vaguely recalled my parents fighting about it. Once, some dishes had been thrown, and I don’t think it was the booze or the women that had started it.
    But by the time I was in high school, the little bar had the allure of the forbidden. Nothing showed through its one dark window, and the sounds when the heavy door pushed open called to me. Laughter, the tinny noise of a jukebox. Smoke. A dozen times I’d gone in, the summer after I graduated. I don’t think my fake ID fooled anyone. Half the town knew my mother; the other half had known my dad, more closely than I liked. Maybe it was that everyone knew I was leaving. Going away to college and the big city. Maybe they felt that earned me entry. That’s when I’d discovered how small the old bar really was: six tables, maybe seven. A dark wooden bar scored and notched from years of fights and burning butts; a row of booths along the back wall. I’d had one or two adventures in that parking lot, too, that summer. Nothing to write home about, but enough to take some of the mystique off the place. I’d left town with no regrets.
    Coming up on it now, it looked almost homey. That same heavy door, the varnish worn off in spots, still separated the quiet street from the revelers within. The same neon sign still beckoned. The cloud of