Dolores Claiborne

    “I'll take care of my mouth,” I says, “you just want to take care of your hands. If you don't, they're gonna get you in more trouble than you could handle in a year of Sundays.”

    His brows went up and he asked me what that was supposed to mean.

    “It means l want you to leave Selena alone,” I says. He looked like I'd hoicked my knee right up into his family jewels. That was the best of a sorry business, Andy-the look on Joe's face when he found out he was found out. His skin went pale and his mouth dropped open and his whole body kinda jerked in that shitty old rocker of his, the way a person's body will jerk sometimes when they are just fallin off to sleep and have a bad thought on their way down.

    He tried to pass it off by actin like he'd had a muscle-twinge in his back, but he didn't fool either one of us. He actually looked a little ashamed of himself, too, but that didn't win him any favor with me. Even a stupid hound-dog has sense enough to look ashamed if you catch it stealin eggs out of a henhouse.

    “I don't know what you're talkin about,” he says. “Then how come you look like the devil just reached into your pants and squeezed your balls?” I asked him.

    The thunder started to come onto his brow then. “If that damned Joe Junior's been tellin lies about me-” he began.

    “Joe Junior ain't been sayin yes, no, aye, nor maybe about you,” I says, “and you can just drop the act, Joe. Selena told me. She told me everything-how she tried to be nice to you after the night I hit you with the cream-pitcher, how you repaid her, and what you said would happen if she ever told.”

    “She's a little liar!” he says, throwin his paper on the floor like that proved it. “A little liar and a god-dam tease! I'm gonna get my belt, and when she shows her face again-if she ever dares to show it around here again-”

    He started to get up. I took one hand and shoved him back down again. It's awful easy, shovin a person who's tryin to get out of a rockin chair; it surprised me a little how easy it was. Accourse, I'd almost bashed his head in with a stovelength not three minutes before, and that mighta had somethin to do with it.

    His eyes went down to narrow little slits and he said I'd better not fool with him. “You've done it before,” he says, “but that don't mean you can bell the cat every time you want to.”

    I'd been thinkin that very thing myself, and not so long before, but that wasn't hardly the time to tell him so. “You can save your big talk for your friends,” I says instead. “What you want to do right now isn't talk but listen… and hear what I say, because I mean every word. If you ever fool with Selena again, I'll see you in State Prison for molesting a child or statutory rape, whichever charge will keep you in cold storage the longest.”

    That flummoxed him. His mouth fell open again and he just sat there for a minute, starin up at me.

    “You'd never,” he begun, and then stopped. Because he seen that I would. So he went into a pet, with his lower lip poochin out farther than ever. “You take her part, don't you?” he says. “You never even ast for my side of it, Dolores.”

    “Do you have one?” I asked him back. “When a man just four years shy of forty asks his fourteen-year-old daughter to take off her underpants so he can see how much hair she has grown on her pussy, can you say that man has a side?”

    “She'll be fifteen next month,” he says, as if that somehow changed everything. He was a piece of work, all right.

    “Do you hear yourself?” I asked him. “Do you hear what's runnin out of your own mouth?”

    He stared at me a little longer, then bent over and picked his newspaper up off the floor. “Leave me alone, Dolores,” he says in his best sulky poor-old-me voice. “I want to finish this article.”

    I felt like tearin the damned paper out of his hands and throwin it in his face, but there would have been a blood-flowin tussle for sure if I had, and I didn't want the kids-especially not Selena-comin in on somethin like that. So I just reached out and pulled down the top of it, gentle, with my thumb.

    “First you're gonna promise me you'll leave Selena alone,” I said, “so we can put this shit-miserable business behind us. You promise me you ain't gonna touch her that way ever again in your life.”

    “Dolores, you ain't-” he starts.

    “Promise, Joe, or I'll make your life hell.”

    “You think that scares me?” he shouts. “You've made my life hell for the last fifteen years, you bitch-your ugly face can't hold a candle to your ugly disposition! If you don't like the way I am, blame yourself!”

    “You don't know what hell is,” I said, “but if you don't promise to leave her alone, I'll see you find out.”

    “All right!” he yells. “All right, I promise! There! Done! Are you satisfied?”