Smile was at Pandora’s when Dori arrived, cached quietly at a corner table and nursing a Coke.  He was wearing a gray coverall she’d never seen before, and his hair was tied back.  “Hey,” she said, swinging past the table before she punched in.  “How’d you get here?”

“Khalid rented a car,” he replied, all but spitting the name out.

Dori made a sad-face, sympathetic to the upset in his voice.  “He’s holding all of this over you, isn’t he?”

Smile shook his head, looking over Dori’s shoulder at one of the ceiling fans.  “Go clock in,” he said.

“What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Nothing.  Go clock in.”

With a shrug, she went and did just that.  Bree was in the office waiting for her.  She handed Dori a glossy class photo of Taylor.  “Is this okay?” she asked.

“It’s good,” Dori said, and slipped it into her lunchbox.  “Thanks.  I’ll let you know what I find out,” she added needlessly.  Between Smile and Bree and apartment shopping she felt massively off-balance.  There had been some subtle shift in the workings of the world, and she hadn’t figured out exactly what it was yet.

The dinner rush was just getting started, and Dori worked without acknowledging Smile for a bit.  Daniel was very much in the swing of things, and tended to Pandora’s business like a pro.  She had to admit that he was good, getting a feel for the way the store ran in just over a week, but then he’d done it by delegating a lot of responsibility to her, and so she wasn’t sure if he was all that good.

While she was working, Smile wandered around behind the counter.  Although he’d left in disgrace, sort of, Daniel didn’t seem to mind his being back in the office.  Dewayne and Bill hung around to chat with him, too.  Dori didn’t hear what they were talking about, but Smile seemed brittle.  Every time she looked at him he was looking back at her.

Finally, she got a chance to talk to him.  “You don’t look good,” she said.

“Yeah?  Well, things aren’t really good, Dori.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged, shaking his head.

“I don’t understand.  Things have been kicking your ass lately, but right now you look like life has completely beaten you down.  You never look like that.”

Smile shrugged again.  “How’s your radio?”

“I told you, it’s cool.  I have to get some new discs to listen to.  Do you want to do something later?”

“Do what?”

“I don’t know.  Whatever.  Just hang out.  You need to decompress,” she said.  Aunt Andrea said that a lot to Uncle Carl, and it just popped out of her mouth.

Smile laughed softly.  “Not very fucking likely,” he said.  “What are we going to do?  Screw on the pool table?”

“If you want,” she replied with a little grin.

He poked her cheek.  “Dimple,” he said.

“I do not have dimples!”

“Sure you do.  Freckles, too.”  Smile had made a career of teasing Dori about her dimple and sparse freckles.

“Dining room!” Daniel called.  He wasn’t yelling or strident, but his statement was as much of a command as he made.

“You’re a fucker,” Dori told Smile cheerfully.  “I’ll be right back.  Keep that look on your face.”  The mirth didn’t last though.  He was collapsing again even as she turned away.  There had to be something she could do to prop him up and keep him up.

The latest customers were a trio of Barbie-like sorority girls.  Not that Dori knew if they were in a sorority or not, but she was fairly certain that she’d seen all of their clothes at the mall, probably in window displays and in their exact current configurations, and there was always something abnormal about people who dressed like that.  Sorority sisterhood was just the most likely answer.  She seated them with a smile, gave them the night’s specials and took their drink orders.  The fountain was right next to the office, so Smile leaned out to talk to her while she was filling the girls’ drinks.

“What do you think of me?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the stuff I’ve done.  I don’t know, what I’ve accomplished with my life.  It isn’t much.  What do you think of it?”

“I don’t think you should get all down on yourself and be like,” she lowered her voice, imitating him, “‘oh, what have I done with my life, not much I guess.’  That’s dumb.”

“You don’t understand,” he said.  “To a man, his accomplishments are what he is.  Women can have children, they have some purpose in life, something to say they were here.  A guy just has whatever he does with himself.  That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.  And I haven’t done shit.”

“That’s so not true.”  She had finished running the drinks, but didn’t want to turn away just yet so she dumped one and started filling it again.  “You have your band.”

“I quit.”

“What do you mean, you quit?  You started the thing, you can’t quit.”

“Well, then I broke it up, whatever.  We weren’t any good anyhow.”

“Is that your opinion, or Khalid’s?”

Smile glared at her.  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You heard me.  You’re going on and on about accomplishments, and you’re downing on the things that you used to be proud of.  Either you’ve been replaced by a robot, or you’re having an acute attack of family-think.  You got this way the last time Khalid was in town too, except I wasn’t going out with you then so I didn’t give a shit.”

“You’re not going out with me now, stupid!”

“Oh, right.”  For a moment, Dori had forgotten.  His calling her stupid really made her mad, though.

“Not that you could tell,” Smile went on.  “I spend half of my time working, and the rest of it doing shit for you.  Fixing your car for free, busting my ass.  Not that I want you to say thank you or anything.”

“Well, thank you,” Dori said, loud and irritated, and sketched a mocking bow as she took the sorority girls their drinks.  Daniel looked curiously at her as she went past the counter, and she wondered if he was going to kick Smile out, but he didn’t.  The girls ordered a Hawaiian pizza, which Dori pretended to think was a fantastic, trendy and delicious decision, and put the order up.  Having to pretend she was happy to be doing something she was normally happy doing had her even more raw when she got back to the office.

Smile had been laying his next words out carefully for her, she could tell.  “You know what?  It’s a good thing we broke up.  I think maybe the thing that was holding me back was that I was spending too much time thinking about your shit, and not enough about my own life.”

That chafed.  Dori had never thought of herself as high-maintenance.  She wasn’t, dammit!  “It’s just as well for you, too,” she said.  “Now maybe you can find yourself a nice submissive Middle Eastern girl that you won’t be ashamed to take home to your parents!”  Dori knew, even as the words came out of her mouth and Smile’s face began to twist into a look of rage that she’d never seen before, that she had just Gone Too Far.  She’d never Gone Too Far before, but she instinctively knew that what she’d said had done it.  It was just…well, it was way too much, and she only half-meant what she was saying.

Still, she was so caught up in being mad and bitter and hateful that she didn’t see Smile’s arm going back, nor his fist coming forward.  There was a weird blank moment, that could have represented half a second or half an hour, and it was filled with a deafening POP of impact, almost like a very localized thunderclap.  When the moment ended, Dori was staggering backward through Pandora’s kitchen toward the counter, her heels beginning to slip on the tile.  She threw a hand out belatedly, to arrest her fall, and succeeded only in pulling a stack of plates down on herself with a crash of shattering crockery.