Dolores Claiborne

    When I saw her face, though, I knew it wasn't firin she'd come to do. All the makeup she'd had on that mornin was scrubbed off, and the way her eyelids were swole up gave me the idear she'd either been takin a nap or cryin in her room. She had a brown paper grocery sack in her arms, and she kinda shoved it at me. “Here,” she says.

    “What's this?” I ast her.

    “Two eclipse-viewers and two reflector-boxes,” she says. “I thought you and Joe might like them. I happened to have-, She stopped then, and coughed into her curled-up fist before lookin me square in the eye again. One thing I admired about her, Andy-no matter what she was sayin or how hard it was for her, she'd look at you when she said it. “I happened to have two extras of each,” she said.

    “Oh?” I says. “I'm sorry to hear that.”

    She waved it away like it was a fly, then ast me if I'd changed my mind about goin on the ferry with her n her comp'ny.

    “No,” I says, “I guess I'll put up m'dogs on my own porch rail n watch it with Joe from there. Or, if he's actin out the Tartar, I'll go down to East Head.”

    “Speaking of acting out the Tartar,” she says, still lookin right at me, “I want to apologize for this morning… and ask if you'd call Mabel Jolander and tell her I've changed my mind.”

    It took a lot of guts for her to say that, Andy-you didn't know her the way I did, so I guess you'll just have to take my word for it, but it took an awful lot of guts. When it came to apologizin, Vera Donovan was pretty much of a teetotaler.

    “Sure I will,” I said, speakin kind of gentle. I almost reached out n touched her hand, but in the end I didn't. “Only it's Karen, not Mabel. Mabel worked here six or seven years ago. She's in New Hampshire these days, her mother says-workin for the telephone comp'ny and doin real well.”

    “Karen, then,” she says. “Ask her back. Just say I've changed my mind, Dolores, not one word more than that. Do you understand?”

    “Yes,” I says. “And thanks for the eclipse-things. They'll come in handy, I'm sure.”

    “You're very welcome,” she says. I opened the door to go out and she says, “Dolores?”

    I looked back over my shoulder, and she give me a funny little nod, as if she knew things she had no business knowin.

    “Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive,” she says. “Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto. “ And then she closed the door in my face… but gentle. She didn't slam it.

    All right; here comes the day of the eclipse, and if I'm going to tell you what happened-everything that happened-I ain't going to do it dry. I been talkin for damn near two hours straight by my watch, long enough to burn the oil offa anyone's bearins, and I'm still a long way from bein done. So I tell you what, Andy-either you part with an inch of the Jim Beam you got in your desk drawer, or we hang it up for tonight. What do you say?

    There-thank you. Boy, don't that just hit the spot! No; put it away. One's enough to prime the pump; two might not do anythin but clog the pipes.

    All right-here we go again.

    On the night of the nineteenth I went to bed so worried I was almost sick to my stomach with it, because the radio said there was a good chance it was gonna rain. I'd been so goddam busy plannin what I was gonna do and workin my nerve up to do it that the thought of rain'd never even crossed my mind. I'm gonna toss n turn all night, I thought as I laid down, and then I thought, No you ain't, Dolores, and I'll tell you why-you can't do a damn thing about the weather, and it don't matter, anyway. You know you mean to do for him even if it rains like a bastard all day long. You've gone too far to back out now. And I did know that, so I closed my eyes n went out like a light.

    Saturday-the twentieth of July, 1963-come up hot n muggy n cloudy. The radio said there most likely wouldn't be any rain after all, unless it was just a few thundershowers late in the evenin, but the clouds were gonna hang around most of the day, and chances of the coastal communities actually seem the eclipse were no better'n fifty-fifty.

    It felt like a big weight had slipped off my shoulders just the same, and when I went off to Vera's to help serve the big brunch buffet she had planned, my mind was calm and my worries behind me. It didn't matter that it was cloudy, you see; it wouldn't even matter if it showered off n on. As long as it didn't pour, the hotel-people would be up on the roof and Vera's people would be out on the reach, all of em hopin there'd be just enough of a break in the cloud-cover to let em get a look at what wasn't gonna happen again in their lifetimes… not in Maine, anyhow. Hope's a powerful force in human nature, you know-no one knows that better'n me.