Dolores Claiborne

    He sat there lookin at me, drummin his fingers on those green accountants” sheets. His nails were all clean and it looked like he'd had a professional manicure, although I guess that ain't too likely-it's Jonesport in 1962 we're talkin about, after all. I s'pose his wife did it. Those nice neat nails made little muffled thumps on the papers each time they came down, n I thought, He ain't gonna do nothin for me, not a man like him. What's he care about island folk and their problems? His ass is covered, n that's all he cares about.

    So when he did speak up, I felt ashamed for what I'd been thinkin about men in general and him in particular.

    “I can't check something like that with you sitting right here, Mrs St George,” he says. “Why don't you go down to The Chatty Buoy and order yourself a cruller and a nice hot cup of coffee? You look like you could use something. I'll join you in fifteen minutes. No, better make it half an hour.”

    “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so very much.”

    He sighed and began shufflin the papers back together. “I must be losin my mind,” he says, then laughed kinda nervous-like.

    “No,” I told him. “You're helpin a woman who don't have nowhere else to turn, that's all.”

    “Ladies in distress have always been a weakness of mine,” he says. “Give me half an hour. Maybe even a little longer.”

    “But you'll come?”

    “Yes,” he said. “I will.”

    He did, too, but it was closer to forty-five minutes than half an hour, and by the time he finally got to the Buoy, I'd pretty well made up my mind he was gonna leave me in the lurch. Then, when he finally came in, I thought he had bad news. I thought I could read it in his face.

    He stood in the doorway a few seconds, takin a good look around to make sure there was nobody in the restaurant who might make trouble for him if we was seen together after the row I made in the bank. Then he came over to the booth in the corner where I was sittin, slid in acrost from me, and says, “It's still in the bank. Most of it, anyway. Just under three thousand dollars.”

    “Thank God!” I said.

    “Well,” he says, “that's the good part. The bad part is that the new account is in his name only.”

    “Accourse it is,” I said. “He sure didn't give me no new passbook account card to sign. That woulda tipped me off to his little game, wouldn't it?”

    “Many women wouldn't know one way or the other,” he says. He cleared his throat, gave a yank on his tie, then looked around quick to see who'd come in when the bell over the door jingled. “Many women sign anything their husbands put in front of them.”

    “Well, I ain't many women,” I says.

    “I've noticed,” he says back, kinda dry. “Anyway, I've done what you asked, and now I really have to get back to the bank. I wish I had time to drink a coffee with you.”

    “You know,” I says, “I kinda doubt that.”

    “Actually, so do I,” he says back. But he gave me his hand to shake, just like I was another man, and I took that as a bit of a compliment. I sat where I was until he was gone, and when the girl came back n asked me if I wanted a fresh cup of coffee, I told her no thanks, I had the acid indigestion from the first one. I had it, all right, but it wasn't the coffee that give it to me.

    A person can always find somethin to be grateful for, no matter how dark things get, and goin back on the ferry, I was grateful that at least I hadn't packed nothing; this way I didn't have all that work to undo again. I was glad I hadn't told Selena, either. I'd set out to, but in the end I was afraid the secret might be too much for her and she'd tell one of her friends and word might get back to Joe that way. It had even crossed my mind that she might get stubborn and say she didn't want to go. I didn't think that was likely, not the way she flinched back from Joe whenever he came close to her, but when it's a teenage girl you're dealin with, anythin's possible-anythin at all.

    So I had a few blessings to count, but no idears. I couldn't very well take the money outta the joint savings account me n Joe had; there was about forty-six dollars in it, and our checkin account was an even bigger laugh-if we weren't overdrawn, we were damned close. I wasn't gonna just grab the kids up and go off, though; no sir and no ma'am. If I did that, Joe'd spend the money just for spite. I knew that as well's I knew my own name. He'd already managed to get through three hundred dollars of it, accordin to Mr Pease… and of the three thousand or so left, I'd put at least twentyfive hundred away myself-I earned it scrubbin floors and warshin windows and hangin out that damned bitch Vera Donovan's sheets-six pins, not just four-all summer long. It wasn't as bad then as it turned out to be in the wintertime, but it still wasn't no day in the park, not by a long shot.