Dolores Claiborne

    She come the next time near the end of November, about a week after Thanksgivin, and she called right away, wantin me to vacuum and make up the beds. The kids weren't with her, accourse-this was durin the school week-but she said they might decide at the last minute to spend the weekend with her instead of in the boardin schools where they were. She prob'ly knew better, but Vera was a Girl Scout at heart-believed in bein prepared, she did.

    I was able to come right away, that bein a slack time on the island for folks in my line of work. I trudged up there in a cold rain with my head down and my mind fumin away like it always did in the days after I found out what had happened to the kids” money. My trip to the bank had been almost a whole month before, and it had been eatin away at me ever since, the way bat'try acid will eat a hole in your clothes or your skin if you get some on you.

    I couldn't eat a decent meal, couldn't sleep more'n three hours at a stretch before some nightmare woke me up, couldn't hardly remember to change m'own underwear. My mind was never far from what Joe'd been up to with Selena, and the money he'd snuck out of the bank, and how was I gonna get it back again. I understood I had to stop thinkin about those things awhile to find an answer-if I could, one might come on its own-but I couldn't seem to do it. Even when my mind did go somewheres else for a little bit, the least little thing would send it tumblin right back down that same old hole. I was stuck in one gear, it was drivin me crazy, and I s'pose that's the real reason I ended up speakin to Vera about what had happened.

    I surely didn't mean to speak to her; she'd been as sore-natured as a lioness with a thorn in her paw ever since she showed her face the May after her husband died, and I didn't have no interest in spillin my guts to a woman who acted like the whole world had turned to shit on her. But when I come in that day, her mood had finally changed for the better.

    She was in the kitchen, pinnin an article she'd “cut out of the front page of the Boston Globe to the cork bulletin board hung on the wall by the pantry door. She says, “Look at this, Dolores-if we're lucky and the weather cooperates, we're going to see something pretty amazing next summer.

    I still remember the headline of that article word for word after all these years; because when I read it, it felt like somethin turned over inside me. TOTAL ECLIPSE TO DARKEN NORTHERN NEW ENGLAND SKIES NEXT SUMMER, it said. There was a little map that showed what part of Maine would be in the path of the eclipse, and Vera'd made a little red pen-mark on it where Little Tall was.

    “There won't be another one until late in the next century,” she says. “Our great-grandchildren might see it, Dolores, but we'll be long gone… so we better appreciate this one!”

    “It'll prob'ly rain like a bugger that day,” I says back, hardly even thinkin about it, and with the dark temper Vera'd been in almost all the time since her husband died, I thought she'd snap at me. Instead she just laughed and went upstairs, hummm. I remember thinkin that the weather in her head really had changed. Not only was she hummin, she didn't have even a trace of a hangover.

    About two hours later I was up in her room, changin the bed where she'd spend so much time layin helpless in later years. She was sittin in her chair by the window, knittin an afghan square n still hummin. The furnace was on but the heat hadn't really took yet-those big houses take donkey's years to get warm, winterized or not-and she had her pink shawl thrown over her shoulders. The wind had come up strong from the west by then, and the rain hittin the window beside her sounded like handfuls of thrown sand. When I looked out that one, I could see the gleam of light comm from the garage that meant the hunky was up there in his little apartment, snug as a bug in a rug. I was tuckin in the corners of the ground sheet (no fitted sheets for Vera Donovan, you c'n bet your bottom dollar on that-fitted sheets woulda been too easy), not thinkin about Joe or the kids at all for a change, and my lower lip started to tremble. Quit that, I told myself. Quit it right now. But that lip wouldn't quit. Then the upper one started to shimmy, too. All at once my eyes filled up with tears n my legs went weak n I sat down on the bed n cried.

    No. No.

    If I'm gonna tell the truth, I might's well go whole hog. The fact is I didn't just cry; I put my apron up over my face and wailed. I was tired and confused and at the end of my thinkin. I hadn't had anything but scratch sleep in weeks and couldn't for the life of me see how I was going to go on. And the thought that kept comm into my head was Guess you were wrong, Dolores. Guess you were thinkin about Joe n the kids after all. And accourse I was. It had got so I wasn't able to think of nothin else, which was exactly why I was bawlin.