Daniel fretted over Dori until she was honestly getting annoyed about it.  He sat her in the office, gave her an ice pack, offered to call an ambulance, offered to call a lawyer and did call the police.  She didn’t want to press charges, but when Daniel told the cops about Smile’s wreck the week before, they ran him through their computer, found that his license was suspended, and went looking for him anyway.  She imagined that the cops were getting kind of sick of seeing her name pop up every few days, but what could she say?  It was being a really weird month.  

She couldn’t work, because Daniel wouldn’t let her.  “I can’t apologize enough times, Dori, that this happened here,” he said.  “I wanted to tell you, though, that the police called, and they have him in custody, so it’s safe for you to go home, whenever you’re comfortable to drive.”

“Can I just finish my shift?”

“You shouldn’t,” Kristi said.

“She’s right.  I’d feel better if you took the rest of the evening off.  I’ll pay you for your full hours, of course.”

Well, she’d be an idiot to argue with that.  She wanted to tell her earnest boss that this was nothing, that it was just a fluke and Smile wasn’t like that, there wasn’t anything for her to be afraid of, but even though she believed it she couldn’t make herself say the words.  Smile had never hit her before.  He’d never even threatened her.  He just wasn’t a violent guy.

Trouble was, there was a knot on the side of her face that kind of said otherwise, and Dori didn’t know what to think.  She felt a bit (okay, a lot) betrayed, because she’d been expending so much energy to defend him to everyone except Aunt Andrea, who liked him, and now he’d gone and proven everyone who said he was a loser right.  Aunt Andrea probably wouldn’t like him very much any more, either, considering that she volunteered at a domestic violence shelter.

“Fuck,” she said, touching the place where he’d punched her.  Half of her face was numb.  It felt like she’d been shot up with Novocaine, until she moved or touched it, and then it hurt.  Daniel had offered her a handful of Advil, and she’d accepted two.  They weren’t helping much.  Dori’s face throbbed, but she knew it felt worse than it looked.  She sat at the table closest to the register, by the door, and every time someone came in she got a blast of cold air across her legs.

Somewhat colder were the stares at her back.  These also probably felt worse than they actually were, but she imagined that everyone in the restaurant was staring at her, talking about the waitress whose boyfriend had just punched her in the face, the one who’d been talking to the police a few minutes ago.

Okay, it was probably all in her imagination, but she didn’t feel like dealing with it, this feeling like everyone in the place was whispering about her, pointing when she wasn’t looking.  That’s her, that’s the girl who got punched.  She wanted to turn around and stare back, or drop her pants and show them her ass, or some other thing to give them a reason to stare.  As the urge grew, Dori decided that it was a good time to take off, before she actually went through with doing something.  She left Pandora’s quietly.

Of course, where the hell was she going to go?  Daniel had already called home for her, so Aunt Andrea was going to fuss when she got there.  Dori didn’t want anyone else fucking fussing over her tonight, she’d had enough.

Meijer seemed like a good escape, for the moment, so she went there.  Dori pulled into the parking lot and sat behind the wheel for a while, looking up at the big, familiar red sign.  Instead of going into the store, though, she detoured past the front doors to the bank of pay phones, and found herself dialing Clover’s number.  Smile attacking her was the kind of thing Clover would insist on hearing about, and she’d be pissed if Dori let it get to her through whatever meager gossip grapevine she possessed.

Did people gossip about her?

Dori supposed they did; after all, the reason she knew Clover would go apeshit if Brian or someone else told her about this Smile escapade was because Clover had hit the roof after learning about the car crash secondhand.

Of course, that didn’t stop her from hitting the roof this time, either.  “I swear to God if I see that son of a bitch I’ll beat him to death!” she exploded.  Dori could hear the phone crackling, as if Clover were about to squeeze the handset in half.  “Dori, what did he do to you?” she asked, as if she hadn’t just heard.

“I’m okay,” she told her.

“No, you’re not.”  Dori could practically see Clover’s sneer of righteous disgust.  “What was the matter with him?  Did he feel like less of a man because you came to your senses and left him?  You hurt his ego, and he lashed out.”

“Um…”  Well, he sort of had, but not exactly.  “It was just a thing,” she said finally.  “It never happened before.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

“Yeah, but…”  She didn’t want to tell Clover about all of Smile’s problems, since her friend wouldn’t be sympathetic anyway.

“But what?”

“Nothing.  I’ll tell you later, maybe.”  Something about talking to Clover was making her very depressed.  Maybe it was the whole thing catching up with her.  It was utterly unfair–Smile had done this crummy thing and she was afraid of him, a little bit, but at the same time she was worried about him.  He certainly hadn’t meant to come to Pandora’s and punch her in the head, and now that he had whatever problems he wanted her help with were ten times worse.

“Where are you now?  Do you want to come and stay the night with us?”

Dori considered Clover’s tiny house way the fuck up in Oak Park, and her hyperactive retriever named Xerxes, and her transparent Trekkie husband Matt.  “Um, not really.  I might go over to the police station, actually.”

“Good.  You need to file a report.”

“No, I already did that.  I was going to post bail for Smile.  Otherwise his brother’s going to have to do it, and that will really, really suck for him.”

Clover wouldn’t have sounded much different if Dori had told her she’d just pissed on the floor.  “You want to bail him out?  Are you fucking psychotic?” she yelled.

She recoiled a little from the anger in Clover’s voice.  “You don’t understand how much Khalid treats him like shit.”

“I don’t care, either.  What, an hour passes and you completely forgive him for assaulting you?  Why are you so weak?”

“I’m not being weak, he’s my friend.”

“You don’t need him, dammit.  You don’t have to take his abuse.”

“I’m not taking anything,” Dori said.  As usual Clover was shouting her down.  The only way to compete was to yell, and yelling hurt her throat and her head and turned a discussion into an argument.  Which was exactly the same problem she had with Smile half the time, come to think of it.  At least with Smile there was makeup sex, though.  “It only happened this one time–”

“Oh, bullshit.  He’s been hitting you for months, Dori.  Don’t act like we haven’t noticed.”

Dori stopped, opened her mouth, but said nothing.  If Smile had hit her before, it was news to her.  And who was ‘we?’  Comment and question collided in her brain and neither made it to being voiced.  She found herself wishing she’d called someone else instead.  Like Nikki.

Duh, why hadn’t that occurred to her?

“Let me help you, Dori,” Clover said, her voice soothing.  “We can get through this together.”

There was that ‘we’ again.  Dori realized, for the first time, that she didn’t really like Clover that much.  Or at all.  “You don’t understand,” she said.  What she meant was, you’re not listening to me, but the distinction was of course lost.

“Yes I do!” Clover screamed.  “Don’t you get it?  My first husband did the same thing to me.  The anger, the violence, and the apologies.  I lied to myself for two years, telling myself it was going to get better.  And it never did.  It took him breaking four of my ribs before I got my head on straight and left him.  I lied to myself,” she said again.  “I recognize the same signs in you, Dori.  You’re where I was before I got married.  Smile likes to have anal sex, doesn’t he?”

Dori’s brain skipped several grooves.  She almost dropped the phone, and looked around to see if Clover’s squawk had been audible to anyone nearby.  Smile had never even mentioned anal sex, at least not as a possibility between them.  “Whuut?”

“He does, doesn’t he?  And you probably let him.”  Clover forged on.  She couldn’t see the incredulous look on Dori’s face, but even if she had been able to, it likely wouldn’t have stopped her.  “It’s how they work out their anger at first.  They can hurt you with your consent, and you’re too humiliated to tell anyone about it.  Sometimes that works for them.  Sometimes the man’s anger–not always at you, but at his job, at his life, at the world–gets to be too much, and fucking you in the ass isn’t enough.  So he starts hitting you.”

“Okay, but–”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Dori.  The true curse is the epidemic of silence.  If more women admit these things to one another, we can be stronger.  We’ll know the signs.”

Dori had an insight into why Clover’s husband Matt was about as threatening as an oven mitt.    She wondered if he had been like that before he married her.

Clover continued her rant for several minutes, and by the end of it it was beginning to sound like she was the one Smile had punched.  Dori missed much of the tirade, because she was trying to picture Clover’s tiny, wiry Filipino first husband Argo climbing up on top of his six-foot four-inch wife to put it in her giant ass, and that was a pretty amazing mental picture.  Dori had never seen Clover naked (she had seen Argo naked, but that was a long story) and had always imagined she looked something like a big mound of softened butter.  The funny thing was that Clover’s calves were thin, out of proportion to the rest of her, and that made picturing her naked more complex.  Her tits were small, too.  The image that she was trying to form in her mind kept breaking up.

Some time between the story of Clover’s being pushed down a flight of stairs by her uncle when she was six and a coach who had tried to fondle her in high school, Dori interrupted her.  “I need to go, Clover.”  Now she’s going to turn it back to me so I’ll let her take care of me, Dori thought.

It was disappointing to be right.  “Are you really okay?  You sound bad.  I can come down there, if you want.  You shouldn’t drive up here by yourself, but I’ll come and bring you back, if you’d like.  In case you don’t want to be alone.  I’ll be down there in half an hour.”

“No, you don’t have to,” Dori said absently.  She was digging in her lunchbox for Nikki’s number.  “It’s a long drive, and it’s late.”

“Fuck that, I’ll be there.  You don’t have to be alone tonight.”

“No, seriously, I’m good,” Dori said.

Clover was silent for a moment.  “You don’t have to shut me out,” she said.

Shit.  There wasn’t any remotely nice way to respond to that, and even though Dori did kind of feel like shutting Clover out, now that she’d been asked not to she couldn’t, without turning Clover into the victim.  Which was of course exactly what she wanted.  “Look, I have something to do tomorrow, and I just want to get sleep tonight.  I’ll call you, okay?”

“Anything,” Clover said.  “I’m off tomorrow, so call any time.”

“Okay.  Thanks.”  Dori hung up gratefully, waited a few seconds, then dialed Nikki’s cell phone.

It was after midnight, but Nikki answered quickly.  She said nothing while Dori told her a condensed version of the evening.  “Basically my ex-boyfriend smacked me while we were having a fight, and it’s a lot more complex than that.  He’s never been abusive before and I have a feeling it has nothing to do with me.”

“Okay,” Nikki said.  “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.”  Dori hoped she was reserving judgment, because she really wanted Nikki to like Smile.

Pleasantly enough, Nikki hummed in agreement and changed the subject.  “So,” Nikki said, “apartment shopping.”

“I looked around a little bit today,” she replied, glad to be talking about something other than getting punched in the face.  She got the idea that Nikki figured she could take care of herself, and if she needed help, she’d ask.  Which was pretty much true.  Dori smiled.  She was also glad that Nikki wasn’t full of threats about what she was going to do to Smile if she saw him.  Clover and Daniel seemed to be forgetting that Dori actually liked Smile, and might not want to have all their awful punishments meted out to him.  At the same time, Nikki seemed more dangerous than Clover, if that meant anything.  Dori had the feeling that where Clover would yell and scream at someone she didn’t like, and generally look scary about the whole thing, Nikki would say nothing and the person would have some mysterious and apparently unrelated accident.  “I didn’t see anything that made me want to live there, at anyplace I looked.  Actually, I’m having a hard time picturing myself living in an apartment at all, it’s kind of weird.  Maybe we should go together.”

“I can do that,” Nikki said.

“I don’t have to work tomorrow,” Dori said, “and I thought we could go apartment shopping, if you’re free.”

“I’d like that.”

Dori smiled at the phone, and felt the need to wander Meijer abate somewhat.  “Oh, fuck, there’s another thing, too.  I need to try and find this chick.”  She told Nikki about Taylor.  “I’m pretty sure I know where she would have gone, thinking that I would have gone there.  I figured maybe if we asked someone, we could find out where she went.  Fuck, I should have done that tonight.”

“Not tonight,” Nikki said.  “Tomorrow.  I’ll come.”

“Cool!  Now I have a reason to wake up in the morning.”

That made Nikki laugh.  “Good.  I’ll see you then.”

Feeling somewhat rejuvenated, Dori popped into Meijer only long enough to pick up some headache medicine with codeine, so she could sleep.

Back at home, she parked under the streetlight, gathered her lunchbox and jacket, and stepped out of the car.

As she closed the door, there was a whistling sound behind her, and a sudden thwack right behind her head.  Dori turned and saw a hand holding a football.

It was the woman she’d seen a few days before at Meijer, the one who’d warned her about the stalkers.  “Careful,” she said.

Across the street, Dori heard male voices.  She looked that way, but didn’t see anyone; they were out of range of the streetlight.  It took a moment to make the connection between the ball and the voices and the thwack sound.  “Dude, did someone just throw that at me?”

“Appears so.”

The voices across the street were growing distant, and Dori could hear scrambling, shuffling, rustling footsteps as they went into the woods.  There was some laughter, too.  They had probably parked on the other side of the railroad tracks and walked in, she realized.  There was a church parking lot over there.  “How long were those fuckheads sitting in the cold waiting for me?” she asked no one in particular.  “And why are you here?  What are you, my guardian angel or something?”

The woman smiled, tossing the ball back across the street.  “Perhaps,” she said.

Dori wasn’t sure how to respond to that.  The woman didn’t seem inclined to elaborate, and she was already walking away.  “Um,” Dori said, but she didn’t look back.

Indoors suddenly seemed like a good place to be, so she went there.