Dolores Claiborne

    I sat down on the edge of the bed n looked at her. I opened my mouth without the slightest idear of what was gonna come out. What did was this: “My husband is trying to screw his own daughter, and when I went to get their college money out of the bank so I could take her n the boys away, I found he'd scooped up the whole kit n caboodle. No, I ain't made out of stone. I ain't made out of stone at all.”

    I started to cry again, and I cried for quite awhile, but not so hard as before and without feelin the need to hide my face behind my apron. When I was down to sniffles, she said to tell her the whole story, right from the beginnin and without leavin a single thing out.

    And I did. I wouldn't have believed I could have told anyone that story, least of all Vera Donovan, with her money and her house in Baltimore and her pet hunky, who she didn't keep around just to Simonize her car, but I did tell her, and I could feel the weight on my heart gettin lighter with every word. I spilled all of it, just like she told me to do.

    “So I'm stuck,” I finished. “I can't figure out what to do about the son of a bitch. I s'pose I could catch on someplace if I just packed the kids up and took em to the mainland-I ain't never been afraid of hard work-but that ain't the point.”

    “What is the point, then?” she asked me. The afghan square she was workin on was almost done-her fingers were about the quickest I've ever seen.

    “He's done everything but rape his own daughter,” I says. “He's scared her so bad she may never get all the way over it, and he's paid himself a reward of purt-near three thousand dollars for his own bad behavior. I ain't gonna let him get away with it-that's the friggin point.”

    “Is it?” she says in that mild voice of hers, and her needles went click-click-click, and the rain went rollin down the windowpanes, and the shadows wiggled n squiggled on her cheek and forehead like black veins. Lookin at her that way made me think of a story my grandmother used to tell about the three sisters in the stars who knit our lives… one to spin and one to hold and one to cut off each thread whenever the fancy takes her. I think that last one's name was Atropos. Even if it's not, that name has always given me the shivers.

    “Yes,” I says to her, “but I'll be goddamned if I see a way to do him the way he deserves to be done.”

    Click-click-click. There was a cup of tea beside her, and she paused long enough to have a sip. There'd come a time when she'd like as not try to drink her tea through her right ear n give herself a Tetley shampoo, but on that fall day in 1962 she was still as sharp as my father's cutthroat razor. When she looked at me, her eyes seemed to bore a hole right through to the other side.

    “What's the worst of it, Dolores?” she says finally, puttin her cup down and pickin up her knittin again. “What would you say is the worst? Not for Selena or the boys, but for you?”

    I didn't even have to stop n think about it. “That sonofawhore's laughin at me,” I says. “That's the worst of it for me. I see it in his face sometimes. I never told him so, but he knows I checked at the bank, he knows damned well, and he knows what I found out.”

    “That could be just your imagination,” she says.

    “I don't give a frig if it is,” I shot right back. “It's how I feel.”

    “Yes,” she Says, “it's how you feel that's important. I agree. Go on, Dolores.”

    What do you mean, go on? I was gonna say. That's all there is. But I guess it wasn't, because somethin else popped out, just like Jack out of his box. “He wouldn't be laughin at me,” I says, “if he knew how close I've come to stoppin his clock for good a couple of times.”

    She just sat there lookin at me, those dark thin shadows chasm each other down her face and gettin in her eyes so I couldn't read em, and I thought of the ladies who spin in the stars again. Especially the one who holds the shears.

    “I'm scared,” I says. “Not of him-of myself. If I don't get the kids away from him soon, somethin bad is gonna happen. I know it is. There's a thing inside me, and it's gettin worse.”

    “Is it an eye?” she ast calmly, and such a chill swept over me then! It was like she'd found a window in my skull and used it to peek right into my thoughts. “Something like an eye?”

    “How'd you know that?” I whispered, and as I sat there my arms broke out in goosebumps n I started to shiver.

    “I know,” she says, and starts knittin a fresh row. “I know all about it, Dolores.”

    “Well… I'm gonna do him in if I don't watch out. That's what I'm afraid of. Then I can forget all about that money. I can forget all about every-thin.”