Dolores Claiborne

    Then, right around the time I packed the boys off to their Aunt Alicia and Uncle Jack's-around the tenth or eleventh of July, that would be, and still over a week before the eclipse-her good mood collapsed.

    Collapsed? Frig, no. That ain't right. It popped, like a balloon that's been stuck with a pin. One day she was zoomin like a jet plane; the next she was steppin on the corners of her mouth and her eyes had taken on the mean, haunted look I'd seen a lot since she started spendin so much time on the island alone.

    She fired two girls that day, one for standin on a hassock to warsh the windows in the parlor, and the other for laughin in the kitchen with one of the caterers. That second one was especially nasty, cause the girl started to cry. She told Vera she'd known the young man in high school n hadn't seen him since n wanted to catch up a little on old times. She said she was sorry and begged not to be let go-she said her mother would be madder than a wet hen if that happened.

    It didn't cut no ice with Vera. “Look on the bright side, dear,” she says in her bitchiest voice. “Your mother may be angry, but you'll have so much time to talk about all the fun you had at good old Jonesport High.”

    The girl-it was Sandra Mulcahey-went down the driveway with her head dropped, sobbin like her heart was gonna break. Vera stood in the hall, bent over a little so she could watch her out the window by the front door. My foot itched to kick her ass when I seen her standin that way… but I felt a little sad for her, too. It wasn't hard to figure out what had changed her mood, and before much longer I knew for sure. Her kids weren't comm to watch the eclipse with her after all, chartered ferry or no chartered ferry. Maybe it was just that they'd made other plans, as kids will do with never a thought for any feelins their parents might have, but my guess was that whatever had gone wrong between her and them was still wrong.

    Vera's mood improved as the first of her other guests started to show up on the sixteenth n seventeenth, but I was still glad to get away each day, and on Thursday the eighteenth she fired another girl-Karen Jolander, that one was. Her big crime was droppin a plate that had been cracked to begin with. Karen wasn't cryin when she went down the driveway, but you could tell she was just holdin on until she was over the first hill to let loose.

    Well, I went and did something stupid-but you have to remember I was pretty strung-up myself by then. I managed to wait until Karen was out of sight, at least, but then I went lookin for Vera. I found her in the back garden. She'd yanked her straw sunhat on so hard the brim touched her ears, and she was takin such snaps with those garden-shears of hers that you'd'a thought she was Madam Durfarge choppin off heads instead of Vera Donovan cuttin roses for the parlor n dinin room.

    I walked right up to her and said, “That was a boogery thing you done, firin that girl like that.”

    She stood up and give me her haughtiest lady-of-the-manor look. “Do you think so? I'm so glad you have your opinion, Dolores. I crave it, you know; each night when I go to bed, I lie there in the dark, reviewing the day and asking the same question as each event passes before my eyes: “What would Dolores St George have done?"”

    Well, that made me madder'n ever. “I'll tell you one thing Dolores Claiborne don't do,” I says, “and that's take it out on someone else when she's pissed off and disappointed about somethin. I guess I ain't enough of a high-riding bitch to do that.”

    Her mouth dropped open like somebody'd pulled the bolts that held her jaw shut. I'm pretty sure that was the first time I really surprised her, and I marched away in a hurry, before she could see how scared I was. My legs were shakin so bad by the time I got into the kitchen that I had to sit down and I thought, You're crazy, Dolores, tweakin her tail like that. I stood up enough to peek out the window over the sink, but her back was to me and she was workin her shears again for all she was worth; roses were fallin into her basket like dead soldiers with bloody heads.

    I was gettin ready to go home that afternoon when she come up behind me and told me to wait a minute, she wanted to talk to me. I felt my heart sink all the way into my shoes. I hadn't no doubt at all that my time'd come-she'd tell me my services wouldn't be required anymore, give me one last Kiss-My-Back-Cheeks stare, and then down the road I'd go, this time for good. You'd think it'd been a relief to get shut of her, and I s'pose in some ways it woulda been, but I felt a pain around my heart just the same. I was thirty-six, I'd been workin hard since I was sixteen, and hadn't never been fired from a job. Just the same, there's some kinds of buggerybullshit a person has to stand up to, and I was tryin with all my might to get ready to do that when I turned around to look at her.