Smile was shoveling snow.  And, like most things this week it seemed, he wasn’t happy about it.

It had been a huge snowstorm–they were calling it a century storm on the news.  His mother hadn’t even needed to call.  Smile knew she’d ask him to come over and shovel, so he was on his way there as soon as he got up and saw how badly the city had been slammed.  One hour and five miles (in a car with a flaky heater, no less) later, he arrived at his parents’ house, and attacked the mountain of white that had buried the Kazemis’ walk an driveway.  Smile’s father had left his car submerged and carpooled with a friend who had a Land Rover, apparently.

Of course, they were the only folks on the block without a snowblower.  His dad had stubbornly refused to buy one for years on end, seeing as how the duty of cleaning the driveway fell to the one of his three sons who hadn’t become a rich doctor and moved away.

Read more…

Thinking about Pete Thomasson so much made Dori realize that a lot of her days passed with nothing of significance happening.  She ferried Taylor home the next afternoon, then had dinner with Smile after helping him clean his apartment.  She tried to talk to him a bit about what was on her mind and the way her brain was spinning lately, and for some reason he assumed she was working up to a marriage proposal and changed the subject. 

She talked to her friend Clover about finding a place to live.  Clover, whose real name was Gail, didn’t help much, just had lots of suggestions about what she shouldn’t do.  Clover was her friend in a way Dori didn’t quite understand.  Clover was big and loud and vegan and radical, and she Wanted To Help.  That seemed to be her mission in life, helping everyone, whether they knew they needed it or not.  When she was in the right, Clover was formidable and cool to be around.  She took no shit, had been arrested protesting for Greenpeace, had gone out to scream and throw bricks at the Ku Klux Klan when they marched in Ann Arbor, and wouldn’t let a conservative politician take a leak without finding a way to make it conclusive proof of his all-encroaching evil.  On the other hand, when Clover was in the wrong, which happened more than she knew, she acted exactly the same way.  That made her a great big gumdrop-shaped no-neck pain in the ass.

Read more…

By Saturday, the blizzard was less exciting, except for the cool changes to the landscape.  It was cold enough that they didn’t use any salt so the roads didn’t get grimy, just stayed white.  It was exotic, somehow.  The set of snow tires Smile had put on the Neon made it nice and easy to drive.  She didn’t even have to borrow the Explorer to get to work.

Pandora’s was dead, of course.  The drivers were busy, and Dori got to take a few deliveries even though they had five drivers on.  Just the same, it was a long day, made all the worse because she had to close.  And then, at eleven-thirty, they got randomly busy; a crowd of college students and older people, most of them coming from a late movie.  Pandora’s was the only restaurant still open.  Suddenly slammed, it was up to Dori to make the dining room presentable; she’d been leaving everything till close, even though she knew it was a mistake.

Dragging a hastily-filled trash bag out to the dumpster, she spotted a chick who looked like Bree’s sister Taylor squatting in the snow in a shadow, shoulders hunched to keep warm.

Read more…

“Where did you say the restaurant was, again?” Smile asked.  They were lost somewhere in Ann Arbor.  He was at the wheel of Dori’s Neon, and Khalid and Sheerin were silent in the back seat.

“I didn’t say,” Dori said.  “It’s in downtown Ann Arbor on Liberty, but I don’t know where we are now.”

“It’s impossible to find your way around this town,” he muttered.  “Is it even any good?”

“Does it matter?  Do you know of another vegetarian place?  You should’ve listened to the directions I gave you.”

Smile glowered.  “So give me directions now.”

“I can’t do that unless you want to start over from home.  I have no idea where we are now.”  Picking up Khalid had turned into a complete clusterfuck, of course.  He and Sheerin wanted to go out to eat, but it had to be a vegetarian restaurant, and Smile had no idea where one was.  Dori did, having flirted with vegetarianism on and off in the past, but directions weren’t her strong suit.  Smile hadn’t paid attention to the directions she gave, and now they’d been driving around in circles for half an hour.

Read more…

With a thunderous boom, forward motion and Bauhaus song turned into a loopy, Tilt-A-Whirl spin and shattering glass.  Lights flashed wildly around Dori, and the smell of burning rubber attacked her nose, but she wasn’t really aware of anything except that she had been singing a moment ago, and now she was screaming.

The Neon spun around twice, hopping the curb at some point, and came to rest on the sidewalk in front of the bowling alley but facing north, toward the K-Mart on the other side of the street.  Dori sat still, holding the wheel in her hands and completely disoriented.  The radio was still on, but the car had stalled.  Some confused, disconnected part of her brain realized that wasn’t right, and she turned the key.  The car wouldn’t start.

Read more…

“Just one more delivery,” Daniel had told Smile.  “I know it was short notice, and you need to get back to your brother, but just one more run, and I think we’ll be okay.”  Daniel had called Smile almost before he was finished showing Khalid and Sheerin his apartment (Sheerin had, of course, wrinkled her nose in displeasure in every room) and begged him to come in just for half an hour, he had no drivers and he was desperate, and he couldn’t get ahold of anyone else except Bill, who didn’t have a car right now.  And so Smile had agreed.  There had been a bit of pleasure in it–Khalid didn’t know he was just delivering pizzas, but if he was being called away in the middle of the night it must be an important job.  He could see the assumption in his older brother’s eyes as he explained that he had to go, and it had felt good.

Of course, “half an hour” had turned quickly into two.  Smile was low on gas and he really wanted to get back home and make sure that Khalid and Sheerin were doing okay–God knew what they were getting into, he imagined Sheerin snooping through his closets if left to her own devices too long–and Daniel had given him one last delivery, a long one.  He’d jammed on out toward Pittsfield full tilt and done it and been rushing back to clock out, and he had known full well he was running the light, but no one was ever crossing at Washtenaw and Golfside at this time of night…or so he had thought until a little red car had shot out in front of him and there’d been no time to even slow down, he had just plowed into the side of it.

Read more…

The negotiation had been brief.  The EMT had appeared, with his box, at the side door of the van that Dori had been taken to, and asked her a few general how-are-you-doing questions.  Once he had made sure she was lucid, he asked if she wanted to go to the hospital, to be checked.  Dori had told him, “Not really,” since she mostly felt like going home and lying down and figuring out what to do now that she had two cars that didn’t work.  “I don’t really like hospitals,” she told the guy.  “All they ever do is look for bigger and bigger things to impale me with.”

“You were in a serious accident,” the EMT said with a tone that suggested he had had this conversation many times before.

“I’ll be okay.  I always am.”

“You know,” he replied casually, running a hand through his sparse hair, “sometimes, you can be in an accident like this and break your neck or your back, and not even know about it for several hours.  Then, without warning, you turn your head or bend over to get something and bam,” he snapped his fingers loudly, “your spinal column is severed.”

Dori blinked at him, eyes huge.  “Um, okay, I’ll go.”

Read more…

Dori was surprised and a bit scared when she couldn’t get herself out of bed the next evening.  After getting a ride home from the hospital from a frantic Aunt Andrea and sleeping like a baby all night (and some of the day) she’d felt fine.  When Smile called that afternoon and left a message that he had sent a mechanic over to fix her Oldsmobile so she would have transportation, she had felt fine, had even told Smile thank you and asked again how he was.  He was distant, and seemed to be annoyed with her.  

When the mechanic got the car running (it took him about ten minutes of poking about), that was fine too.  But when she woke up from her afternoon nap, she couldn’t move.  Dori’s eyes opened, and she stared at the ceiling and couldn’t move.  It was as though one arm was held down by her wrecked Neon, and the other by the fact that she had to move out, and one of her legs was trapped under the shit with stupid Chris Sinclair and his fans who seemed determined to make her life miserable through pranks and occasional threats.  Her other leg was stuck under the whole Smile situation, even though that was technically resolved.  And she couldn’t get up.

She could hear the television in the other room; Aunt Andrea was watching the news.  And she knew she had to work at seven, so it was time to get up.  But the order was issued to her legs, and they just ignored her.  A message came back from her feet.  Who gives a shit? it said.  Everything sucks.  And her feet didn’t move.

Read more…

Taylor showed up at Pandora’s (well, out back, actually, where Daniel wouldn’t see her) with a big red handprint on her face.  She’d been kicked out again, or maybe she’d stormed out.  She certainly hadn’t slapped herself.  “Can I sleep on your couch again?” she asked Dori.

She knew that letting Taylor come home with her again wasn’t the brightest of ideas, foolish even, but couldn’t think of a remotely nice way to tell her this. 

And really, it wasn’t that it was a bad idea, it wasn’t like they were fucking, it was just that the way Taylor idolized Dori made her uncomfortable.  In the end, she was feeling too good after her conversation with Charles, and if Dori was addicted to anything it was making people feel good.  Letting the kid come home with her again would obviously make Taylor’s day, and that was enough to convince Dori to do it.

Read more…

“There’s absolutely no reason for a man over the age of eighteen to ever be fired from a job,” Khalid Kazemi said.  He was standing over Smile, who was a picture of smoldering agitation at one end of the couch, but he wasn’t looking at his younger brother.  “Especially not a job for high school students,” Khalid added.  “I can understand why you haven’t told our mother and father about this job, but why did you have it in the first place?  Is delivering food really all that you’re capable of?”

Smile said nothing.  His fists were balled at his temples, eyes on the floor, and he was clenching his teeth, hard, so hard he thought they might crack if Khalid didn’t shut up soon.  Sheerin was in the kitchen, ostensibly scrubbing the space between the stove and the counter, but no doubt listening to every word they said.  At least Khalid was speaking English.

“I had to reassure our mother when you failed out of med school.  I told her you’d be okay, that you were still finding your way.  She asked me to talk to you, while I was here, you know.”

“About what?”  He tried to keep the anger out of his voice, and failed.

Read more…