Dolores Claiborne

    Lyin there in the dark and calm again at last, the answer seemed simple enough: I had to take the kids and move to the mainland, and I had to do it soon. I was calm enough right then, but I knew I wasn't gonna stay that way; that inside eye wouldn't let me. The next time I got hot, it would see even better and Joe would look even uglier and there might not be any thought on earth that could keep me from doin it. It was a new way of bein mad, at least for me, and I was just wise enough to see the damage it could do, if I let it. I had to get us away from Little Tall before that madness could break all the way out. And when I made my first move in that direction, I found out what that funny half-wise look in his eyes meant. Did I ever!

    I waited awhile for things to settle, then I took the eleven o'clock ferry across to the mainland one Friday mornin. The kids were in school and Joe was out on the boundin main with Mike Stargill and his brother Gordon, playin with the lobster-pots-he wouldn't be back til almost sundown.

    I had the kids” savins account passbooks with me. We'd been puttin money away for their college ever since they were born. I had, anyway; Joe didn't give a squitter if they went to college or not. Whenever the subject came up-and it was always me who brought it up, accourse-he'd most likely be sittin there in his shitty rocker with his face hid behind the Ellsworth American and he'd poke it out just long enough to say, “Why in Christ's name are you so set on sendin those kids to college, Dolores? I never went, and I did all right.”

    Well, there's some things you just can't argue with, ain't there? If Joe thought that readin the paper, minin for boogers, and wipen em on the runners of his rockin chair was doin all right, there wasn't no room at all for discussion; it was hopeless from the word go. That was all right, though. As long as I could keep makin him kick in his fair share if he happened to fall into somethin good, like when he got on the county road crew, I didn't give a shit if he thought every college in the country was run by the Commies. The winter he worked on the road crew on the mainland, I got him to put five hundred dollars in their bank accounts, and he whined like a pup. Said I was takin all his dividend. I knew better, though, Andy. If that sonofawhore didn't make two thousand, maybe twenty-five hundred, dollars that winter, I'll smile n kiss a pig.

    “Why do you always want to nag me so, Dolores?” he'd ask.

    “If you were man enough to do what's right for your kids in the first place, I wouldn't have to,” I'd tell him, and around n around it'd go, blah-blahblahdy-blah. I got pretty sick of it from time to time, Andy, but I almost always got out of him what I thought the kids had comin. I couldn't get too sick of it to do that, because they didn't have nobody else to make sure their future'd still be there for em when they got to it.

    There wasn't a lot in those three accounts by today's standards-two thousand or so in Selena's, about eight hundred in Joe Junior's, four or five hundred in Little Pete's-but this is 1962 I'm talkin about, and in those days it was a fairish chunk of change. More'n enough to get away on, that was for sure. I figured to draw Little Pete's in cash and take cashier's checks for the other two. I'd decided to make a clean break and move us all the way down to Portland-find a place to live and a decent job. We wasn't none of us used to city livin, but people can get used to damned near anything if they have to. Besides, Portland wasn't really much more than a big town back then-not like it is now.

    Once I got settled, I could start puttin back the money I'd had to take, and I thought I could do it. Even if I couldn't, they was bright kids, and I knew there were such things as scholarships. If they missed out on those, I decided I wasn't too proud to fill out a few loan applications. The major thing was to get them away-right then doin that seemed a lot more important than college. First things first, as the bumper sticker on Joe's old Farmall tractor used to say.