Stephen King - Dolores Claiborne

In 1961 things started out just as they had all those other years, even though her husband had died in that car-crash the year before—she n the kids showed up on Memorial Day and Vera went to work knittin n doin jigsaw puzzles, collectin shells, smokin cigarettes, and havin her special Vera Donovan brand of cocktail hour, which started at five and finished around nine-thirty. But it wasn’t the same, even I could see that, n I was only the hired help. The kids were drawn-in and quiet, still mournin their Dad, I guess, and not long after the Fourth of July, the three of em had a real wowser of an argument while they were eatin at The Harborside. I remember Jimmy DeWitt, who waited table there back then, sayin he thought it had somethin to do with the car.

Whatever it was, the kids left the next day. The hunky took em across to the mainland in the big motorboat they had, and I imagine some other hired hand grabbed onto em there. I ain’t seen neither one of em since. Vera stayed. You could see she wasn’t happy, but she stayed. That was a bad summer to be around her. She must have fired half a dozen temporary girls before Labor Day finally came, and when I seen the Princess leavin the dock with her on it, I thought, I bet we don’t see her next summer, or not for as long. She’ll mend her fences with her kids—she’ll have to, they’re all she’s got now—and if they’re sick of Little Tall, she’ll bend to them and go somewheres else. After all, it’s comin to be their time now, and she’ll have to recognize that.

Which only shows you how little I knew Vera Donovan back then. As far as that kitty was concerned, she didn’t have to recognize Jack Shit on a hill of beans if she didn’t want to. She showed up on the ferry Memorial Day afternoon in 1962 —by herself—and stayed right through until Labor Day. She came by herself, she hadn’t a good word for me or anybody else, she was drinkin more’n ever and looked like death’s Gramma most days, but she came n she stayed n she did her jigsaw puzzles n she went down—all by herself now—n collected her shells on the beach, just like she always had. Once she told me that she believed Donald and Helga would be spending August at Pinewood (which was what they always called the house; you prob’ly know that, Andy, but I doubt if Nancy does), but they never showed up.

It was durin 1962 that she started comin up regular after Labor Day. She called in mid-October and asked me to open the house, which I did. She stayed three days—the hunky come with her, and stayed in the apartment over the garage—then left again. Before she did, she called me on the phone and told me to have Dougie Tappert check the furnace, and to leave the dust-sheets off the furniture. “You’ll be seeing a lot more of me now that my husband’s affairs are finally settled,” she says. “P’raps more of me than you like, Dolores. And I hope you’ll be seeing the children, too. ” But I heard somethin in her voice that makes me think she knew that part was wishful thinkin, even back then.

She come the next time near the end of November, about a week after Thanksgivin, and she called right away, wantin me to vacuum and make up the beds. The kids weren’t with her, accourse—this was durin the school week—but she said they might decide at the last minute to spend the weekend with her instead of in the boardin schools where they were. She prob’ly knew better, but Vera was a Girl Scout at heart—believed in bein prepared, she did.

I was able to come right away, that bein a slack time on the island for folks in my line of work. I trudged up there in a cold rain with my head down and my mind fumin away like it always did in the days after I found out what had happened to the kids’ money. My trip to the bank had been almost a whole month before, and it had been eatin away at me ever since, the way bat’try acid will eat a hole in your clothes or your skin if you get some on you.

I couldn’t eat a decent meal, couldn’t sleep more’n three hours at a stretch before some nightmare woke me up, couldn’t hardly remember to change m‘own underwear. My mind was never far from what Joe’d been up to with Selena, and the money he’d snuck out of the bank, and how was I gonna get it back again. I understood I had to stop thinkin about those things awhile to find an answer—if I could, one might come on its own—but I couldn’t seem to do it. Even when my mind did go somewheres else for a little bit, the least little thing would send it tumblin right back down that same old hole. I was stuck in one gear, it was drivin me crazy, and I s’pose that’s the real reason I ended up speakin to Vera about what had happened.

I surely didn’t mean to speak to her; she’d been as sore-natured as a lioness with a thorn in her paw ever since she showed her face the May after her husband died, and I didn’t have no interest in spillin my guts to a woman who acted like the whole world had turned to shit on her. But when I come in that day, her mood had finally changed for the better.

She was in the kitchen, pinnin an article she’d cut out of the front page of the Boston Globe to the cork bulletin board hung on the wall by the pantry door. She says, “Look at this, Dolores—if we’re lucky and the weather cooperates, we’re going to see something pretty amazing next summer.”

I still remember the headline of that article word for word after all these years, because when I read it, it felt like somethin turned over inside me. TOTAL ECLIPSE TO DARKEN NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND SKIES NEXT SUMMER, it said. There was a little map that showed what part of Maine would be in the path of the eclipse, and Vera’d made a little red pen-mark on it where Little Tall was.

“There won’t be another one until late in the next century,” she says. “Our great-grandchildren might see it, Dolores, but we’ll be long gone… so we better appreciate this one!”

“It’ll prob’ly rain like a bugger that day,” I says back, hardly even thinkin about it, and with the dark temper Vera’d been in almost all the time since her husband died, I thought she’d snap at me. Instead she just laughed and went upstairs, hummin. I remember thinkin that the weather in her head really had changed. Not only was she hummin, she didn’t have even a trace of a hangover.

About two hours later I was up in her room, changin the bed where she’d spend so much time layin helpless in later years. She was sittin in her chair by the window, knittin an afghan square n still hummin. The furnace was on but the heat hadn’t really took yet—those big houses take donkey’s years to get warm, winterized or not—and she had her pink shawl thrown over her shoulders. The wind had come up strong from the west by then, and the rain hittin the window beside her sounded like handfuls of thrown sand. When I looked out that one, I could see the gleam of light comin from the garage that meant the hunky was up there in his little apartment, snug as a bug in a rug.

I was tuckin in the corners of the ground sheet (no fitted sheets for Vera Donovan, you c’n bet your bottom dollar on that—fitted sheets woulda been too easy), not thinkin about Joe or the kids at all for a change, and my lower lip started to tremble. Quit that, I told myself. Quit it right now. But that lip wouldn’t quit. Then the upper one started to shimmy, too. All at once my eyes filled up with tears n my legs went weak n I sat down on the bed n cried.

No. No.

If I’m gonna tell the truth, I might’s well go whole hog. The fact is I didn’t just cry; I put my apron up over my face and wailed. I was tired and confused and at the end of my thinkin. I hadn’t had anything but scratch sleep in weeks and couldn’t for the life of me see how I was going to go on. And the thought that kept comin into my head was Guess you were wrong, Dolores. Guess you were thinkin about Joe n the kids after all. And accourse I was. It had got so I wasn’t able to think of nothin else, which was exactly why I was bawlin.