Stephen King - Dolores Claiborne

“That wa’ant half-bad, Dolores,” he said—high praise, comin from him.

I had a second there when I kinda wavered—I ain’t gonna sit here and say different. It was a second when it wasn’t Joe puttin his hands all over Selena that I saw, but the way his forehead looked in study-hall back in 1945—how I saw that and wanted him to kiss me just the way he was kissin me now; how I thought, “If he kissed me I’d reach up and touch the skin there on his brow while he did it… see if it’s as smooth as it looks.”

I reached out my hand n touched it then, just like I’d dreamed of doin all those years before, when I’d been nothin but a green girl, and the minute I did, that inside eye opened wider’n ever. What it saw was how he’d go on if I let him go on—not just gettin what he wanted from Selena, or spendin the money he’d robbed out of his kids’ bank accounts, but workin on em; belittlin Joe Junior for his good grades n his love of history; clappin Little Pete on the back whenever Pete called somebody a sheeny or said one of his classmates was lazy as a nigger; workin on em; always workin on em. He’d go on until they were broke or spoiled, if I let him, and in the end he’d die n leave us with nothin but bills and a hole to bury him in.

Well, I had a hole for him, one thirty feet deep instead of just six, and lined with chunks of field-stone instead of dirt. You bet I had a hole for him, and one kiss after three years or maybe even five wasn’t gonna change it. Neither was touchin his forehead, which had been a lot more the cause of all my trouble than his pulin little dingus ever was… but I touched it again, just the same; traced one finger over it and thought about how he kissed me on the patio of The Samoset Inn while the band inside played “Moonlight Cocktail,” and how I’d been able to smell his father’s cologne on his cheeks when he did.

Then I hardened my heart.

“I’m glad,” I said, n picked up the tray again. “Why don’t you see what you can make of those viewers and the reflector-boxes while I do up these few dishes?”

“I don’t give a fuck about anything that rich cunt gave you,” he says, “and I don’t give a fuck about the goddam eclipse, either. I’ve seen dark before. It happens every goddam night.”

“All right,” I says. “Suit yourself.”

I got as far’s the door and he says, “Maybe you n me can get up to dickens later on. What would you think about that, Dee?”

“Maybe,” I says, all the time thinkin there was gonna be plenty of dickens, all right. Before it got dark for the second time that day, Joe St. George was gonna get more dickens than he’d ever dreamed of.

I kept my good weather eye on him while I was standin at the sink and doin up our few dishes. He hadn’t done anything in bed but sleep, snore, n fart for years, and I think he knew as well’s I did that the booze had as much to do with that as my ugly face… prob’ly more. I was scared that maybe the idear of gettin his ashes hauled later on would cause him to put the cap back on that bottle of Johnnie Walker, but no such bad luck. For Joe, fuckin (pardon my language, Nancy) was just a fancy, like kissin me had been. The bottle was a lot realer to him. The bottle was right there where he could touch it. He’d gotten one of the eclipse-viewers out of the bag and was holdin it up by the handle, turnin it this way n that, squintin at the sun through it. He reminded me of a thing I saw on TV once—a chimpanzee tryin to tune a radio. Then he put it down and poured himself another drink.

When I came back out on the porch with my sewin basket, I saw he was already gettin that owly, red-around-the-eyes look he had when he was on his way from moderately tickled to thoroughly tanked. He looked at me pretty sharp just the same, no doubt wonderin if I was gonna bitch at him.

“Don’t mind me,” I says, sweet as sugar-pie, “I’m just gonna sit here and do a little mendin and wait for the eclipse to start. It’s nice that the sun came out, isn’t it?”

“Christ, Dolores, you must think this is my birthday,” he says. His voice had started to get thick and furry.

“Well—somethin like it, maybe,” I says, and began sewin up a rip in a pair of Little Pete’s jeans.

The next hour and a half passed slower’n any time had since I was a little girl, and my Aunt Cloris promised to come n take me to my first movie down in Ellsworth. I finished Little Pete’s jeans, sewed patches on two pairs of Joe Junior’s chinos (even back then that boy would absolutely not wear jeans—I think part of him’d already decided he was gonna be a politician when he grew up), and hemmed two of Selena’s skirts. The last thing I did was sew a new fly in one of Joe’s two or three pairs of good slacks. They were old but not entirely worn out. I remember thinkin they would do to bury him in.

Then, just when I thought it was never gonna happen, I noticed the light on my hands seemed a little dimmer.

“Dolores?” Joe says. “I think this is what you n all the rest of the fools’ve been waitin for.”

“Ayuh,” I says. “I guess.” The light in the dooryard had gone from that strong afternoon yellow it has in July to a kind of faded rose, and the shadow of the house layin across the driveway had taken on a funny thin kind of look I’d never seen before and never have since.

I took one of the reflector-boxes from the bag, held it out the way Vera’d showed me about a hundred times in the last week or so, and when I did I had the funniest thought: That little girl is doin this, too, I thought. The one who’s sittin on her father’s lap. She’s doin this very same thing.

I didn’t know what that thought meant then, Andy, and I don’t really know now, but I’m tellin you anyway—because I made up my mind I’d tell you everythin, and because I thought of her again later. Except in the next second or two I wasn’t just thinkin of her; I was seein her, the way you see people in dreams, or the way I guess the Old Testament prophets must have seen things in their visions: a little girl maybe ten years old, with her own reflector-box in her hands. She was wearin a short dress with red n yellow stripes—a kind of sundress with straps instead of sleeves, you know —and lipstick the color of peppermint candy. Her hair was blonde, and put up in the back, like she wanted to look older’n she really was. I saw somethin else, as well, somethin that made me think of Joe: her Daddy’s hand was on her leg, way up high. Higher’n it ought to’ve been, maybe. Then it was gone.

“Dolores?” Joe ast me. “You all right?”

“What do you mean?” I asks back. “Course I am.”

“You looked funny there for a minute.”

“It’s just the eclipse,” I says, and I really think that’s what it was, Andy, but I also think that little girl I saw then n again later was a real little girl, and that she was sittin with her father somewhere else along the path of the eclipse at the same time I was sittin on the back porch with Joe.

I looked down in the box and seen a little tiny white sun, so bright it was like lookin at a fifty-cent piece on fire, with a dark curve bit into one side of it. I looked at it for a little while, then at Joe. He was holdin up one of the viewers, peerin into it.

“Goddam,” he says. “She’s disappearin, all right. ”

The crickets started to sing in the grass right about then; I guess they’d decided sundown was comin early that day, and it was time for em to crank up. I looked out on the reach at all the boats, and saw the water they were floatin on looked a darker blue now—there was somethin about them that was creepy n wonderful at the same time. My brain kept tryin to believe that all those boats sittin there under that funny dark summer sky were just a hallucination.