Wild Child by Molly O'Keefe

awake, and there was work to do.
    You, Monica Appleby, are writing a book about the night your father was shot dead by your mother .
    Jackson’s words, his incredulous horror, still sent prickling chills down her arms. Like the feeling she got when she caught herself from falling, or managed to avoid a car accident, or thought of her mother.
    “Let’s go see the sights,” she said, shaking out her hands, hoping the prickly feeling would go away.
    She dragged the unwilling and surprisingly hard-to-drag Reba out into the hallway. But once she was out in the world, Reba gave herself a nose-to-tail shake and began to prance down the hall beside Monica, who found herself smiling at the little dog’s strut.
    Outside the front door of the Peabody, all the flowers were in bloom, which made the air smell like lotion.Bees the size of hummingbirds roamed the flowering bushes.
    The sun she planned to soak up was sinking low behind the city buildings across the street, and the sky to the east looked dark and bruised. She didn’t remember this town from when her mother brought her here when she was six. They’d been running away, and Monica had only seen the inside of the apartment Simone had grown up in.
    An apartment above a bar.
    The Pour House.
    There had been neon signs in dark windows, she remembered that. Some of them had been broken.
    She turned right at the corner down a residential street where the houses were smaller and closer together. Kids’ toys and bikes lay in yards, dropped when the shout for dinner came. In one yard a dog, chained to a cinder block, chewed on a bone and eyed Reba.
    Unintimidated, Reba worked her strut a little harder, shaking out her back paws as they passed.
    It didn’t take long to find. A few more lucky turns and she stood kitty-corner to a squat yellow brick building. The horizontal windows were black and long, filled with neon beer signs. Above it were the dark windows of an apartment.
    The Pour House was the poster child of dive bars. It was the dive bar other bars wished they could be. The neon o ’s in the sign were still burnt out, the way they probably always had been and always would be.
    Monica appreciated a good dive bar, the honesty of a place that knew exactly what it was and exactly the service it provided.
    But this wasn’t just any dive bar. It was her nightmare.
    I’ve got some kind of fucked-up karmic relationship with this place .
    It was there—well, actually behind The Pour House, in the damp alley by the stairs leading up to that apartment—that her mom shot her dad.
    Monica shook her head, denying the memories. Not that there were many, but they were there, just under the surface, dark sharks circling a crippled boat. She was good at denying those memories. Had been doing it for years, pushing them away, drinking them away, fucking them away.
    Not anymore , she told herself, her stomach opening up like a black hole to swallow the rest of her organs. You’re writing about it, remember?
    Reba barked once, staring up at her through the white fringe of fur around her eyes.
    “I know. But what else have I got?” She’d accepted the advance. Her editor was “eager to see Monica’s take on such a personal horrific and cultural event.”
    Awesome .
    Before she could let the ghosts win and talk herself out of it, she stomped across the street, poor Reba running to keep up, and pulled open the door to The Pour House.
    Only to stare—slack-jawed—with surprise.
    If the outside was the same, the inside was a revelation. A dive bar reformed. The brass and wood of the bar gleamed in the low light. All the taps—a huge array, like a beer-tap fence across the top of the mahogany bar—sparkled. The dark green vinyl on the bar stools was all intact and showed no sign of duct-tape repair work. The copper lights overhead cast the room in a warm glow. And the blackboard on the far wall announced “Sean’s BBQ, coming soon.”
    All in all, totally different from the dark,