Stephen King - Dolores Claiborne

It didn’t cut no ice with Vera. “Look on the bright side, dear,” she says in her bitchiest voice. “Your mother may be angry, but you’ll have so much time to talk about all the fun you had at good old Jonesport High. ”

The girl—it was Sandra Mulcahey—went down the driveway with her head dropped, sobbin like her heart was gonna break. Vera stood in the hall, bent over a little so she could watch her out the window by the front door. My foot itched to kick her ass when I seen her standin that way… but I felt a little sad for her, too. It wasn’t hard to figure out what had changed her mood, and before much longer I knew for sure. Her kids weren’t comin to watch the eclipse with her after all, chartered ferry or no chartered ferry. Maybe it was just that they’d made other plans, as kids will do with never a thought for any feelins their parents might have, but my guess was that whatever had gone wrong between her and them was still wrong.

Vera’s mood improved as the first of her other guests started to show up on the sixteenth n seventeenth, but I was still glad to get away each day, and on Thursday the eighteenth she fired another girl—Karen Jolander, that one was. Her big crime was droppin a plate that had been cracked to begin with. Karen wasn’t cryin when she went down the driveway, but you could tell she was just holdin on until she was over the first hill to let loose.

Well, I went and did somethin stupid—but you have to remember I was pretty strung-up myself by then. I managed to wait until Karen was out of sight, at least, but then I went lookin for Vera. I found her in the back garden. She’d yanked her straw sunhat on so hard the brim touched her ears, and she was takin such snaps with those garden-shears of hers that you’d’a thought she was Madam Dufarge choppin off heads instead of Vera Donovan cuttin roses for the parlor n dinin room.

I walked right up to her and said, “That was a boogery thing you done, firin that girl like that.”

She stood up and give me her haughtiest lady-of-the-manor look. “Do you think so? I’m so glad to have your opinion, Dolores. I crave it, you know; each night when I go to bed, I lie there in the dark, reviewing the day and asking the same question as each event passes before my eyes: ‘What would Dolores St. George have done?’ ”

Well, that made me madder’n ever. “I’ll tell you one thing Dolores Claiborne don’t do,” I says, “and that’s take it out on someone else when she’s pissed off and disappointed about somethin. I guess I ain’t enough of a high-riding bitch to do that.”

Her mouth dropped open like somebody’d pulled the bolts that held her jaw shut. I’m pretty sure that was the first time I really surprised her, and I marched away in a hurry, before she could see how scared I was. My legs were shakin so bad by the time I got into the kitchen that I had to sit down and I thought, You’re crazy, Dolores, tweakin her tail like that. I stood up enough to peek out the window over the sink, but her back was to me and she was workin her shears again for all she was worth; roses were fallin into her basket like dead soldiers with bloody heads.

I was gettin ready to go home that afternoon when she come up behind me and told me to wait a minute, she wanted to talk to me. I felt my heart sink all the way into my shoes. I hadn’t no doubt at all that my time’d come—she’d tell me my services wouldn’t be required anymore, give me one last Kiss-My-Back-Cheeks stare, and then down the road I’d go, this time for good. You’d think it’d been a relief to get shut of her, and I s’pose in some ways it woulda been, but I felt a pain around my heart just the same. I was thirty-six, I’d been workin hard since I was sixteen, and hadn’t never been fired from a job. Just the same, there’s some kinds of buggery-bullshit a person has to stand up to, and I was tryin with all my might to get ready to do that when I turned around to look at her.

When I saw her face, though, I knew it wasn’t firin she’d come to do. All the makeup she’d had on that mornin was scrubbed off, and the way her eyelids were swole up gave me the idear she’d either been takin a nap or cryin in her room. She had a brown paper grocery sack in her arms, and she kinda shoved it at me. “Here,” she says.

“What’s this?” I ast her.

“Two eclipse-viewers and two reflector-boxes,” she says. “I thought you and Joe might like them. I happened to have—” She stopped then, and coughed into her curled-up fist before lookin me square in the eye again. One thing I admired about her, Andy—no matter what she was sayin or how hard it was for her, she’d look at you when she said it. “I happened to have two extras of each,” she said.

“Oh?” I says. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

She waved it away like it was a fly, then ast me if I’d changed my mind about goin on the ferry with her n her comp’ny.

“No,” I says, “I guess I’ll put up m’dogs on my own porch rail n watch it with Joe from there. Or, if he’s actin out the Tartar, I’ll go down to East Head.”

“Speaking of acting out the Tartar,” she says, still lookin right at me, “I want to apologize for this morning… and ask if you’d call Mabel Jolander and tell her I’ve changed my mind.”

It took a lot of guts for her to say that, Andy—you didn’t know her the way I did, so I guess you’ll just have to take my word for it, but it took an awful lot of guts. When it came to apologizin, Vera Donovan was pretty much of a teetotaler.

“Sure I will,” I said, speakin kind of gentle. I almost reached out n touched her hand, but in the end I didn’t. “Only it’s Karen, not Mabel. Mabel worked here six or seven years ago. She’s in New Hampshire these days, her mother says—workin for the telephone comp’ny and doin real well.”

“Karen, then,” she says. “Ask her back. Just say I’ve changed my mind, Dolores, not one word more than that. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I says. “And thanks for the eclipse-things. They’ll come in handy, I’m sure.”

“You’re very welcome,” she says. I opened the door to go out and she says, “Dolores?”

I looked back over my shoulder, and she give me a funny little nod, as if she knew things she had no business knowin.

“Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive,” she says. “Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto. ” And then she closed the door in my face… but gentle. She didn’t slam it.

All right; here comes the day of the eclipse, and if I’m going to tell you what happened— everything that happened—I ain’t going to do it dry. I been talkin for damn near two hours straight by my watch, long enough to burn the oil offa anyone’s bearins, and I’m still a long way from bein done. So I tell you what, Andy—either you part with an inch of the Jim Beam you got in your desk drawer, or we hang it up for tonight. What do you say?

There—thank you. Boy, don’t that just hit the spot! No; put it away. One’s enough to prime the pump; two might not do anythin but clog the pipes.

All right—here we go again.

On the night of the nineteenth I went to bed so worried I was almost sick to my stomach with it, because the radio said there was a good chance it was gonna rain. I’d been so goddam busy plannin what I was gonna do and workin my nerve up to do it that the thought of rain’d never even crossed my mind. I’m gonna toss n turn all night, I thought as I laid down, and then I thought, No you ain’t, Dolores, and I’ll tell you why—-you can’t do a damn thing about the weather, and it don’t matter, anyway. You know you mean to do for him even if it rains like a bastard all day long. You’ve gone too far to back out now. And I did know that, so I closed my eyes n went out like a light.