by Ed Peaco
It was a Sunday evening and still winter, and I was hoping the square-mile heap of manure would freeze before Doralisa arrived. I live in a trailer next to my ruin of a house, across the road from a huge hog farm that had been a pasture up until the previous fall. I’m in health-care equipment sales. But I don’t work for the seller anymore; I work for a giant distributor that works for the buyer. I don’t get paid for moving product; I get paid for saving money for hospitals and clinics. It’s no way to get rich, but it’s civilized. I’d been too stubborn to sell out to the pig people, and I was beginning to realize what a huge mistake that was.
Doralisa pulled into my old driveway, which stopped at the aging ruins of my burned-down house. With a mask over her nose and mouth, she scurried toward the row of cinder blocks that kept people from driving over the eight-foot drop into the caved-in pile of rubble. I opened the trailer door at the right moment so she wouldn’t have to break stride.
She took her knit cap off, making her unruly hair stick out in several ways. Inside the trailer, she pressed her face into a fistful of ground cloves wrapped in cheesecloth. She crinkled her nose and stopped my hand as I reached for her. On the stove, I had a pot of kidney, beef, beans and stuff, which, for as long as I can remember, I’d been eating from and adding to. I’d forgotten to hide it before her arrival. “You know I hate the sight of that,” she said, blowing out air from her puffed cheeks.
“Sorry,” I said. I covered the pot and put it in the fridge.
“I spent the whole day helping Doc move his supplies out of the Fair & Snug,” she said. “I can’t believe the city agreed to get rid of the building.”
Doc was one of Doralisa’s colleagues, an unsheltered former medical student who provided a form of healthcare to street people. He was also known as Bob, Doc Bob, and sometimes Lucky, in honor of his gambling problems. I didn’t care much for him. He’d been operating out of the Fair & Snug, an old, vacant building downtown that had once been a grand hotel and was now slated for demolition in the name of progress. It had earned its nickname over the years by providing an unofficial safe place for the folks that Doralisa served. Doralisa helped find useable mattresses and bedding, and provided other resources for the unsheltered people staying there.
She rummaged through her coat and found a package of incense. “I’m not coming out here anymore. You’ve created this entire methane-based environment outside and in. Only you can survive in it.” She lit two sticks and twirled smoke trails from the TV over to the sink and back, which, in my trailer, was not especially far. “Sandalwood this time,” she said. It was one of our agreed-upon scents that didn’t make me sneeze. She placed the sticks in the ceramic Buddha on the coffee table. The incense holder was a gift to herself for when she came to my place. She’d picked it up during one of her shopping sprees.
I waited until she was through setting up. “Let’s sit down,” I said, running my fingers along her buttons and down her thigh.
She sighed and stopped my hand again. “Not in front of the Buddha.” She trapped my hand against her thigh and I turned my hand around to hold hers and draw her over to my lumpy, sagging couch. She fumbled with the cloves cheesecloth.
“We’ve run out of legal tricks,” she said. “Demolition is tomorrow. I hate the demolition but I’m also angry with you. The stench, your stupid trailer, and being friends with Art. He’s such a jerk!”
“Sorry to hear about the demo,” I said. In our town, there’s a do-good non-profit called Change for the Better, directed by my old friend Art. They planned to level the Fair & Snug and eventually that whole blighted part of downtown. The idea was to re-house the homeless in retooled army barracks, to provide better housing as they were steered into the right programs. I had been a member of Change for the Better, but when Art tried to use me to keep Doralisa under his thumb, I got pissed off and quit. That made me feel bad because I liked the reform plan and didn’t think much of squatting. I felt worse because I was sure Doralisa would lose this battle.
“Don’t say you’re sorry.” She ground her teeth. “We’re going to take drastic action, up to and including arrest.” She folded the cheesecloth and flicked yellow residue off her fingers. The sharp odor of cloves mixed with sandalwood made yet a third strong odor.
I didn’t bother to ask whether the Fair & Snug was worth being hauled off to jail over, or whether it was right to house people in a building that might cave in on them. She had recently introduced me to a few somewhat bizarre street folks like Doc and Gopher.
Art and I worked out of the same office building downtown and we chatted from time to time. Art was making a pile in financial planning, he lived in a swanky subdivision and he was the school board president — nothing remotely close to my own career path, but to Doralisa I was guilty by association.
“Feel this,” she said, guiding my hand along the window sill. I felt a draft, and I smelled the filth of the hogs. I knew about the draft, but I didn’t care. “You live in substandard housing. You’re probably the only ex-member of Change for the Better who lives in a hovel that wouldn’t even qualify for a federal subsidy. This is karma for setting your house on fire, even if it was by accident.”
This had been her theme of recent weeks. “The insurance company made a good investment in me,” I said. “I’ve turned things around. I just didn’t anticipate the long term effects of the hog farm.”
“Oh please,” she said. It’s true that my house burned down some years ago. I set the Christmas tree on fire accidentally, but my ex figured I did it on purpose. My then-wife agreed to a divorce if I gave her the insurance money, which was a great deal for me at the time. And then I blew it by not selling out to the mega hog farm. All because I wanted to make a small fire in the fireplace at Christmas. I’d joined Change for the Better out of guilt over the whole thing, a self-imposed sentence of community service, a way of settling my accounts. It was the best way I knew how to live. But, now that I’d quit the group, I needed another way of contributing. And clearly, I needed a new place to live.
“Guess I need to do something about my housing situation,” I said. “Especially if you’re not going to come out here anymore!”
She opened the window and let in a foul, chilly gust. She covered her face and sucked mightily through the cloth. Then she took the cloth away. “You know why I came here tonight? So you’ll know to stay away from tomorrow’s demonstration. I can’t make any kind of point if a salesman in a bad suit shows up to bail me out.”
“Let’s do something then besides talking about bad days,” I said. “I know this will sound a little off the wall,” slamming the window shut. “But the mall closes in an hour.” Doralisa liked to shop as a kind of guilty pleasure. I’d learned to suggest it at key moments. The mall was only a ten-minute drive from my estate.
She took short, shallow breaths, then nodded. “Sure, let’s get out of here. Separate cars. I’ll head home from there.”
I actually enjoyed watching Doralisa shop—up to a point. I enjoyed watching her cheer up as she stopped thinking about her troubles. Sometimes she bought something; sometimes she didn’t. Of course, as an advocate for the unsheltered, she was self-conscious about wearing conspicuously consumptive things. She liked jewelry, usually necklaces and pendants and such, which she could wear under a turtleneck. The only way I could find out what jewelry she was wearing, if any, was to take off the turtleneck.
— — —
I caught up with Doralisa in the glare of the mall’s atrium of spindly trees. For a weeknight in early March, it seemed crowded. This being a smallish city, it wasn’t surprising to run into someone we knew, but I was irritated to see Art waving at us from a distance. He was wearing Dockers, a polo shirt, wire-rimmed glasses and a neatly trimmed, slightly graying beard that made him look like the thoughtful, morally superior type of guy he tried so hard to be. He was no doubt bubbling with a spontaneous fable about responsibility and shared values. “Good God, there’s no escape,” she said, and waved to me to hustle into Macy’s. After a number of twists and turns in the store, we felt safe.
She led me to, of all places, the perfume counter. In the field of cosmetics, she had only slightly more experience than me. But from time to time, she liked to belly up to the counter and sample her arms and wrists full of everything in sight. I’d usually wander off to the housewares department, looking for new gadgets. “I know why I’m here,” she said through the glare of shiny perfume bottles and new aromas. “Are you looking for something tonight?”
I said, “There is one thing I’d like to find: a stackable, detachable, bin system to replace dresser drawers and laundry baskets: convenient, portable storage. I’ve imagined it in my head but don’t know if it exists.”
“They do exist,” she said as she presented her wrist to a smocked girl across the counter. “I’ve seen them on QVC.” She inhaled, then passed her wrist to me. I braced for the incoming odor. Staying with her was worth the risk of my face swelling up and my sneezing, because I was afraid the next time I’d see her she might be in jail. So I tagged along as we accumulated scents, up one arm and down the other.
“Pick something you like,” I said. “If you like it, you’ll have a positive effect on those around you.” At this, the counter girl rolled her eyes and stepped away to help another customer. Then there was a quiet, awkward moment, so I kept talking. “Why don’t you look at something you might buy? Have something to show for the trip.”
She huffed and made a 180. “Fine,” she said. She grabbed a pair of gloves from a close-out table and walked away at a brisk pace. I tried to keep up.
“Will these do?” She said. I kept walking, occasionally staring at the ceiling. I smirked to myself, briefly, and I saw that she noticed. Oh dear. Not good.
“You came here just to laugh at me?” she said.
“No, I came here because we needed a distraction. I was playing along, too.”
We threaded through narrow aisles in the huge store and rubbed elbows with clothes like some form of retail underbrush. “Do you want to look for your bins?”
“Not really,” I said. We were about to leave the store, and I noticed she was still holding the gloves. “Hey, you never paid for those.”
“How observant.” She slit her eyes at me. It was a scary, serious anger—scary because over the months, I’d done many things that should have made her mad but didn’t. “You wanted me to have something to show for the trip,” she said.
“Come off it,” I said. “Go back and pay for the gloves.”
“That’s a good one, coming from you. I should be buying face masks instead.”
She slipped away from me and left the store.
The mall hallway was filling up with people leaving at closing time. I called out for her but came up empty. I noticed a tall, bald guy in a navy blazer escorting Doralisa back into the store. I doubt she saw me or wanted to see me at this point. She was looking down while the guy hustled her along with what I could tell was a firm grip on her upper arm.
I wandered back into the store in a minor panic. I’d heard about shoplifting but never had to deal with it. I took my time and tried to think of the right things to say. I went up to a clerk and inquired, and the clerk referred me to a woman wearing the same kind of navy blazer as the bald guy. She told me that Doralisa had been arrested and where I could find her. What a night this had become.
— — —
Downtown at the new city-county justice center, I wanted to know when she would be released. But all I could do was talk into a speaker to a clerk behind glass who replied that I should have a seat and wait.
I knew I was in for the long haul, with plenty of time to think about what I would say to Doralisa when given the chance. I spent what felt like an eternity in the lobby with bathrooms blocked by WET FLOOR DO NOT ENTER signs, which I ignored, my bladder having expanded in the sweaty chair as bright lights made my face throb. I had to say something but wasn’t sure what I could say. I couldn’t tell her it was all my fault for suggesting the trip to the mall, but I was the one with that brilliant idea.
I thought about other people, especially other fairly high-profile women in our town who got stuck in the same pickle. A police woman had to quit after it came out that she stole lingerie. An anchorwoman swiped one of those little bottles of liquor, strawberry-melon schnapps as I recall, but the TV station insisted it was a misunderstanding, and she stayed on. So I thought it could go either way for Doralisa, and either way, redemption was always possible (though never easy) for someone who was otherwise overwhelmingly good. And I remembered both cases came to light a long time after the actual moment the women were caught. No matter which way it went, the opportunity remained for her to go ahead and stage her protest the following day and get arrested for the right reason without this shoplifting issue getting in the way. That’s assuming they’d let her go tonight. Although the whole matter was rather sad, there was a scrap or two of hope I could offer her. When they finally let her out, she took short, shuffling steps and squinted into the glare. She looked sick and I embraced her gently.
“Are you OK?” I asked.
“I guess so. I’m just dwelling about how I’ve compromised my position as a maverick activist with already flimsy support. I don’t know what I was thinking, leaving the store like I did.”
That’s all she said, and didn’t want me talking. She held some paperwork in one hand and in the other, a Black Hills gold heart necklace which I’d given her as something she could wear under her clothes.
“First, they did a standard suicide assessment,” she said. “I know those questions. I’ve been on the asking end.” She looked at her feet. “I must have passed. They put me in a cage with an honest-to-God screaming meemie. An old woman. But she calmed down after a while, and we had a nice talk.” Doralisa took a deep breath, glanced at me, and looked back at the floor. “I’m so sorry I let you down. So, so sorry.” Arm in arm, we worked our way out the door. She stopped and breathed heavily, like an invalid on a once-a-day walk. Then she spoke again. “This may sound strange, but thank you. I was pissed and just walked off with the damn gloves. I tried to tell them it was a stupid mistake but I don’t know if they believed me.”
“Well, I’ve been thinking,” I said. “There are a couple of encouraging things to keep in mind. Your case won’t come to light immediately. It may be days or weeks, the way these things work.”
“This night has been like a weird intervention.” She sighed deeply. “Now I need to figure things out.”
She laughed, a single self-mocking cackle. “Things couldn’t get much worse.”
“Ok,” I said, “but I don’t see a big deal being made about shoplifting cases. Drunk driving would be another matter. Indecent exposure. That kind of thing.” I tried to infuse a little humor into the situation, but it fell flat.
“That will do for now,” she said. We walked with intertwined arms to my car, gradually picking up the pace. We exhaled gusts of fog into the cold night, and I allowed myself to enjoy the silence. Then she stopped and made her arm into a pretend nutcracker and crushed my biceps. “You may be right. I can rest after I’m disgraced.” We went to my car and drove together over to her car. Before she got out, she leaned over and put her hand on my chest. “I don’t want to talk anymore. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She drove off, and I went on home to my trailer.
— — —
Early Monday morning before going to the office, I visited the courtyard, looking for Gopher, the only street guy I knew who was willing and able to talk to me. The courtyard is a spot across the street from the building where I work, down a narrow alley leading to an open area formed by the walls of a historic theater, a parking garage, a bank, and another building I didn’t recognize from the back. No one looked there for the homeless. Fire escape rules kept the alley from being blocked off, so Doralisa used the courtyard to shelter people until she found them somewhere better to stay. She’d taken me there several times to show me what happened when people fell through the cracks. Several big packing boxes sat against the wall. I really wanted to find Gopher and, of course, he wasn’t there. But he must have seen me coming out of the alley, because he and Doc cornered me before I crossed the street, and we went back into the courtyard for a chat.
“Sad to blow up that beautiful building,” I said.
“Folks are spreading out. You have to keep moving.” Gopher said, chewing on the hair of his fluffy gray beard. He was wearing a jumpsuit like a car mechanic’s, unzipped to his waist over a couple of flannel shirts. “I’m not sure where I’m going. Don’t know about nobody else. I feel like shit today. I’m trying to find D.” Doralisa’s street name was D, or Aunt D.
I opened my wallet and gave him a five. “Me, too. I haven’t seen D yet today. She got picked up for shoplifting last night. But she’ll be going ahead with the protest. I hope she’s ok.”
“Get lost. Leave us alone,” Doc said, a man of many words. “Go away, Marvin.”
Later that morning, I looked down from aloft to the Fair & Snug. From my office on the sixth floor of the grand old downtown office building, I watched a crowd assemble at the vacant hotel site. I saw a bulldozer, a crane, and giant rubble bins. Then Art knocked on my open door and greeted me enthusiastically. He pumped his fist. “Sure you don’t want to go down and watch?”
“Got stuff to do,” I said. I opened my laptop to suggest I was busy.
“She’s down there, isn’t she?” Art asked.
I sat at my desk and pecked at my keyboard. “She’s down there somewhere.”
Art came closer and put his hand on my back. I imagined a massive crab arm. “You know, my friend,” Art said, “you may find it useful to re-evaluate your relationship with her. She’s unstable. She’s not good for the people she champions.”
I twisted in my chair to get out from under his palm. I was afraid of losing my cool. “Don’t talk to me like that,” I said. I got up and went back to the window. “You better go.”
I had to wait until Art left the building. I didn’t get down the elevator and over to the Fair & Snug until the level of commotion had risen higher than I’d hoped for. What must have been the whole police force with all its vehicles was on hand, outnumbering everyone and everything. I found workers with hard hats sitting in their pickups and curious gawkers waiting for the spectacle of a demonstration or a demolition, or both.
A helicopter bearing the logo of the klepto-anchorwoman’s station circled as a turkey vulture would over its intended prey. Doralisa, with a bullhorn and whistle, was stirring up chants from ragged protesters clustered around the four front columns, and cops with billy clubs, masks, goggles and plastic gloves were standing by. She was doing that chant of “What do we want?” and “When do we want it?” I didn’t bother to listen to what they wanted—justice, I suppose.
I pressed firmly ahead into the space between gawkers and radicals, and I tapped her on the shoulder. She flinched from neck to elbow. Then she saw who I was and frowned with one eyebrow raised. “Good luck,” I said. “And be careful.”
She lowered the bullhorn and looked at me. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “Any minute now, we’re all going to drop to the ground.” I noticed Doc leering at me, and I got the idea I was not part of this crowd. Then she brought the bullhorn to her face and squawked at me, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” That was a knee-slapper for Doc and got a chuckle from the crowd.
A cop came over with a surgical mask hanging loosely at his neck. He held a fistful of foot-long, slender white plastic strips. He talked to Doralisa. “OK, we’re moving in on you. Two minutes! Fair warning?” She stuck out her chin. I kept thinking, So this is what she’s really like. I kind of zoned out on this thought for a moment. “What are you looking at?” The cop asked me. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m not part of this,” I said.
“You’re interrupting our work, sir,” he told me. “You have to step back.” I must have just stood there, because he took one of his plastic strips and dangled it in front of my face. “I said step back, or we’ll tie you up and throw you in the wagon. And we might drop you a few times.”
“I don’t want that,” I told the cop. My eyes wandered to the bystanders, and Art’s righteously bearded face leaped out at me. I glanced at Doralisa, but she had gone off to rally her troops. I passed through the crowd, which wasn’t all that big anyway.
— — —
On the six o’clock news, the klepto-anchorwoman’s station made quite a fuss about the Fair & Snug that night. I saw a few seconds of Doralisa and her bullhorn, then people being hauled off like sacks of manure bound up with those twist-ties. It took half the day to secure the building, they said. They also showed the implosion, which I’m glad I caught, because I’d missed it when it happened, not wanting to look out my window anymore. At the end of the report, they mentioned Doralisa by name as one of the chief radicals and noted that she had a shoplifting charge pending against her. The klepto-anchorwoman didn’t read that part. Her partner did, a guy with a stony chin. He curled up one side of his mouth after he read it, and then there was a commercial.
In a way, I was proud of Doralisa for prevailing on her own terms.
As for the unsheltered, I’d heard reports the next day of the barracks filling up and of some people with outstanding warrants being rounded up, too. That didn’t sound like such a bad thing to me, but I knew Doralisa would have a different take on it, and I was surprised she hadn’t called to give me an earful. I didn’t see her the next day or the day after and I couldn’t find her, even at her house. The police told me she’d been booked and released. I asked her friends and looked all over, but no results. After three days, I stopped checking with the cops. I left her some long, pathetic messages.
— — —
I drove around, called around and checked the courtyard every day after lunch the rest of the week. I usually ran into Gopher and Doc, who told me nothing. They never asked me for money, but I always gave each of them a five.
On Saturday, Gopher helped me understand there was another place: the abandoned warehouses along the rails. He muttered, “I know where she is. I’m worried about her. What Doc’s doing for her ain’t helpin’.”
Doc was coming our way. “Steady,” Gopher said. “Don’t say nothin’. Meet me behind Lambie’s at seven. I’ll take you to her.” Lambie’s was a diner where Gopher got throw-away chicken and rolls.
Doc stood over us with his hands in the pockets of his outermost coat. I asked him if he’d seen Doralisa, and he shrugged. I handed out tens. Doc wouldn’t talk to me, but he was happy to take my cash. He showed his front teeth and sucked in. “You made of money?” he asked. “Or just scared of going to hell?”
I played my voicemail over and over. Nothing from Doralisa. I didn’t eat anything. Too nervous. Then, at 6:53, I left for Lambie’s. I found Gopher out back, scratching his back against the flipped-open lid of a Dumpster. He grabbed some old newspapers someone had tossed out. We walked down an alley until we reached the truly crummy part of the city, just a few blocks away from the small prosperous part of downtown. We followed disused train tracks to a warehouse and loading platform, abandoned when the railroad line pulled out. A distant streetlight illuminated puddles, mud, loose boards and scattered pallets of partially looted goods. We went under the loading platform and crawled through a little bashed-in area of the brick wall. We stood up in total darkness.
Gopher felt my back, then groped for my hand and led me along. I stumbled a few times over things that sounded like cans. Gopher lit a match, and I had my phone flashlight. I saw the cans were Sterno, and figured that’s why he had some newspapers. I heard coughing, close, and that scared me. Gopher lit another match, and a far-off light shined in our faces. Then the light shined away from us. It was Doralisa, shining a flashlight in her face and managing a little smile. I saw the light through the shadow of her tangled hair. She looked like she was fading away. She was lying on a pallet of big white bags, like bags for decorative bark or mulch, with bottles of water, protein shakes and electrolytes from Doc. She grunted again, or laughed, and the bags twisted under her.
“See?” Gopher asked me. “My humble opinion, Doc’s not doin’ enough. This place is cold, drafty, smelly and filled with sickies.”
She sat up, cross-legged, holding a small squeeze bottle of water in her lap, wearing an overcoat, giving off a sharp body-odor smell, and looking gray under the eyes. She set the flashlight so it provided a small glow, enough for all of us. I was not surprised to find her this way. I’d already imagined it, and worse.
“I’m fasting so I can think about myself,” she said. She unscrewed the cap of the water bottle and tried to take a drink, but it was empty. “Just taking a break,” she said. “A bunch of things have built up in me. I’m starving them out.” She laughed softly. She held her head in her hands. Then she put her hands in her lap and shook her head in a vague, brief way. “A lot of noise, no sleep, dizzy,” she said. I reached out to touch her, but she shuddered. “I just want to say I was right about some people not using the barracks. They won’t check themselves in if they’ve had trouble with the law. So, as I’ve tried to point out before, we still have an unsheltered problem, and that’s all I want to say about that.” She stared past me, into the dark beyond the small cloud of flashlight yellow. “I know this is a silly, high-strung thing to do. But, you know, it’s my decision.”
I felt the cold coming up around my ankles. My feet felt heavy. I wanted to sit down but didn’t know where. “Can I get you anything?” I asked. I was worried about her rambling.
She turned the water bottle upside down. “More,” she said. She slowly arched one eyebrow, then let it fall quickly. “I’m not trying to kill myself. Doc set me up with lots of liquids.”
“Where’s Doc?” I asked.
“Makin’ rounds,” Gopher said. He handed her another water bottle.
I imagined Doc visiting places like this one, taping up sprains, sewing up cuts and helping runaways puke up quarts of vodka.
“You need help,” I said. “We need to get you out of here, now!”
“Hey,” she shouted, which came out more like a croak than a shout.
It struck me that what she was doing—choosing quackery even though she could afford the best—was like shoplifting, where you do something stupid even though you have money in your pocket to do the right thing. “I don’t get this at all,” I said. “Makes no sense!”
She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “You know what I’m doing right now?” she asked. “I’m doing my penance. It’s harder than you might think.”
“Let’s get you out of this jungle of rubble and old needles. I’ll haul you on my back to civilization. Why didn’t you just go home?”
“You really need to leave me now,” she said. “More water, though, would be good. I need a little more time.”
I could tell from her tone, even through the sad croak, that she was serious. That made me mad. I reached for the matches and searched desperately for one of the Sterno cans I’d kicked. I finally found one and clutched it in my shaky hands.
“I’ll show you what to watch,” I said. I had to use three or four matches before the can got going. I lit a page of newspaper in the small flame. I lit another page and had a modest conflagration up and running. “You can hop on this funeral pyre, or you can save your ass like a smart human being.”
She reared back and looked scared. “You’re crazy!” she shouted.
“Me?” The Sterno was sending up bitter smoke that clogged my sinuses while I fed the paper fire. Right about then Gopher bailed out of the room, stumbling and raising a racket.
Doralisa glared at me. A considerable amount of light now filled the room. “You jerk,” she said. It was somewhat fun to see the flames rising. I saw plenty of stuff that would burn real well if it got hot enough—broken down chairs, busted up floorboards, another stack of something, maybe cardboard. I came closer to her, waving a burning page and tried to formulate words, right there on the spot.
“These flames may look like they’re coming from sheets of paper or that pink glop in a can.” I squinted at her through the smoke. I definitely had her undivided attention. I had to get to the point because my fingers were in danger of being singed. “These flames come from, believe it or not, inside me. I care about you! We have to get you out of here. You have work to do!”
She looked at me for a long time and stood up slowly. “All right, sure,” she said. She seemed to have more energy, now that she was on her feet. I feared she might fall, but she kept going. I stomped on the paper and the flames went out quickly. We made our way back into the area that was pitch-black when we came in, but now had enough light to see shapes. We walked slowly, arm in arm on the tracks back toward downtown. I just wanted to get her away from there.
“I hope I’ll be OK,” she said.
“You will be.”
She used me for support most of the time, but once or twice I felt a squeeze of a little something extra. That made me feel good, because I was the one dragging her off against her will, and now maybe she was coming around. What she did next had to be up to her, but I was bound and determined not to let her go.
“I’m glad you lit the place up,” she said.
“So am I. It was the perfect burn, wasn’t it? No more than necessary to make my point.”
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