The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen Page A

the men, her arms heavy with bags that looked like they contained bottles of wine and potato chips. Cheap wine and chips? Not her usual fare. Her hair, normally in a chignon as tight as a baby’s fist, was only half up. The other half was falling around her pretty, wide face. She seemed strangely unfocused and uneasy on her feet.
    She was drunk .
    Willa would have thought it was funny, would have enjoyed watching the drunken spectacle of someone who had made a lifetime commitment to perfection, whose simple existence made all the women around her feel less somehow, fall flat on her face … if it weren’t for the men surrounding her.
    There was a strange but universal understanding among women. On some level, all women knew, they all understood, the fear of being outnumbered, of being helpless. It throbbed in their chests when they thought about the times they left stores and were followed. The knocks on their car windows as they were sitting alone at red lights, and strangers asking for rides. Having too much to drink and losing their ability to be forceful enough to just say no. Smiling at strange men coming on to them, not wanting to hurt their feelings, not wantingto make a scene. All women remembered these things, even if they had never happened to them personally. It was a part of their collective unconscious.
    Willa couldn’t just sit there on the side of the road and not help. She had to do something. What, she wasn’t quite sure. But she jerked her Jeep in gear anyway, and crossed the road to the convenience store’s parking lot, thinking that nothing about this day had been normal, nothing had been boring.
    And she would never, ever admit, not even to herself, that she kind of liked it.
    She stopped in front of the group, the Jeep’s high beams on. She saw Paxton jerk her arm away from one of the men trying to touch her, then walk forward, only to be blocked by the other man.
    Willa reached into her bag for her pepper spray and opened the door.
    “Hi, Paxton,” she said. Her heart was racing, and she could feel the adrenaline surge. “What are you doing here?”
    The men turned to her. Paxton’s head jerked up, and Willa saw it, her fear, primal. She was the weak animal surrounded by predators. Help me .
    “Look, a mini one. We got enough for a real party now,” the man holding Paxton’s arm said. He had abuse written all over him. It had happened to him. He had delivered it. It was so much a part of his psyche that he couldn’t look at another person and not imagine what they would look like with bruises. Willa felt it, the way he looked at her neck and the thin skin along her cheekbones.
    “Why don’t you let go of her? I’m pretty sure she wants to leave,” Willa said. Her hand was already throbbing from clenching the can of pepper spray. She was hyperaware of everything around her, every small sound, every change in the air.
    Robbie snickered. He’d always been the boy to hang out with the rough bunch at school, not really one of them but close enough. And like most people, he’d figured close enough was better than not fitting in at all. “Come on, Willa, how often do we get a drunk prom queen around here? And she sent me a love letter in high school. She denied it and made everyone laugh at me, but she sent it to me. Admit it, Paxton.”
    “Robbie, for God’s sake, I sent you that letter,” Willa said. “I was the Joker. That’s the kind of stupid thing I did back then. She didn’t have anything to do with it.”
    He gave her a confused look.
    Willa left them and marched to the convenience store’s door and called inside, “Call 911.”
    The clerk looked up from his magazine, then looked back down, ignoring her.
    “That’s my brother,” the second man said. “He ain’t calling no one.”
    Willa slowly backed up. She knew she could run to her Jeep and call 911 and wait with her doors locked. But that would leave Paxton to fend for herself, and the last thing any woman wanted