Dolores Claiborne

thin kind of look I’d never seen before and never have since.

I took one of the reflector-boxes from the bag, held it out the way Vera’d showed me about a hundred times in the last week or so, and when I did I had the funniest thought: That little girl is doin this, too, I thought. The one who’s sittin on her father’s lap. She’s doin this very same thing.

I didn’t know what that thought meant then, Andy, and I don’t really know now, but I’m tellin you anyway— because I made up my mind I’d tell you everythin, and because I thought of her again later. Except in the next second or two I wasn’t just thinkin of her; I was seein her, the way you see people in dreams, or the way I guess the Old Testament prophets must have seen things in their visions: a little girl maybe ten years old, with her own reflector-box in her hands. She was wearin a short dress with red n yellow stripes—a kind of sundress with straps instead of sleeves, you know —and lipstick the color of peppermint candy. Her hair was blonde, and put up in the back, like she wanted to look older’n she really was. I saw somethin else, as well, somethin that made me think of Joe: her Daddy’s hand was on her leg, way up high. Higher’n it ought to’ve been, maybe. Then it was gone.

“Dolores?” Joe ast me. “You all right?”

“What do you mean?” I asks back. “Course I am.”

“You looked funny there for a minute.”

“It’s just the eclipse,” I says, and I really think that’s what it was, Andy, but I also think that little girl I saw then n again later was a real little girl, and that she was sittin with her father somewhere else along the path of the eclipse at the same time I was sittin on the back porch with Joe.

I looked down in the box and seen a little tiny white sun, so bright it was like lookin at a fifty-cent piece on fire, with a dark curve bit into one side of it. I looked at it for a little while, then at Joe. He was holdin up one of the viewers, peerin into it.

“Goddam,” he says. “She’s disappearin, all right. ”

The crickets started to sing in the grass right about then; I guess they’d decided sundown was comin early that day, and it was time for em to crank up. I looked out on the reach at all the boats, and saw the water they were floatin on looked a darker blue now—there was somethin about them that was creepy n wonderful at the same time. My brain kept tryin to believe that all those boats sittin there under that funny dark summer sky were just a hallucination.

I glanced at my watch and saw it was goin on ten til five. That meant for the next hour or so everyone on the island would be thinkin about nothin else and watchin nothin else. East Lane was dead empty, our neighbors were either on the Island Princess or the hotel roof, and if I really meant to do him, the time’d come. My guts felt like they were all wound into one big spring and I couldn’t quite get that thing I’d seen—the little girl sittin on her Daddy’s lap—out of my mind, but I couldn’t let either of those things stop me or even distract me, not for a single minute. I knew if I didn’t do it right then, I wouldn’t never.

I put the reflector-box down beside my sewin and said, “Joe.”

“What?” he ast me. He’d pooh-poohed the eclipse before, but now that it’d actually started, it seemed like he couldn’t take his eyes off it. His head was tipped back and the eclipse-viewer he was lookin through cast one of those funny, faded shadows on his face.

“It’s time for the surprise,” I said.

“What surprise?” he ast, and when he lowered the eclipse-viewer, which was just this double layer of special polarized glass in a frame, to look at me, I saw it wasn’t fascination with the eclipse after all, or not completely. He was halfway to bein shit-faced, and so groggy I got a little scared. If he didn’t understand what I was sayin, my plan was buggered before it even got started. And what was I gonna do then? I didn’t know. The only thing I did know scared the hell outta me: I wasn’t gonna turn back. No matter how wrong things went or what happened later, I wasn’t gonna turn back.

Then he reached out a hand, grabbed me by the shoulder, and shook me. “What in God’s name’re you talkin about, woman?” he says.

“You know the money in the kids’ bank accounts?” I asks him.

His eyes narrowed a little, and I saw he wasn’t anywhere near as drunk as I’d first thought. I understood something else, too—that one kiss didn’t change a thing. Anyone can give a kiss, after all; a kiss was how Judas Iscariot showed the Romans which one was Jesus.

“What about it?” he says.

“You took it.”

“Like hell!”

“Oh yes,” I says. “After I found out you’d been foolin with Selena, I went to the bank. I meant to withdraw the money, then take the kids and get them away from you.”

His mouth dropped open and for a few seconds he just gaped at me. Then he started to laugh—just leaned back in his rocker and let fly while the day went on gettin darker all around him. “Well, you got fooled, didn’t you?” he says. Then he helped himself to a little more Scotch and looked up at the sky through the eclipse-viewer again. This time I couldn’t hardly see the shadow on his face. “Half gone, Dolores!” he says. “Half gone now, maybe a little more!”

I looked down into my reflector-box and seen he was right; only half of that fifty-cent piece was left, and more was goin all the time. “Ayuh,” I says. “Half gone, so it is. As to the money, Joe—”

“You just forget that,” he told me. “Don’t trouble your pointy little head about it. That money’s just about fine.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about it,” I says. “Not a bit. The way you fooled me, though—that weighs on my mind.”

He nodded, kinda solemn n thoughtful, as if to show me he understood n even sympathized, but he couldn’t hold onto the expression. Pretty soon he busted out laughin again, like a little kid who’s gettin scolded by a teacher he ain’t in the least afraid of. He laughed so hard he sprayed a little silver cloud of spit into the air in front of his mouth.

“I’m sorry, Dolores,” he says when he was able to talk again, “I don’t mean to laugh, but I did steal a march on you, didn’t I?”

“Oh, ayuh,” I agreed. It wasn’t nothing but the truth, after all.

“Fooled you right and proper,” he says, laughin and shakin his head the way you do when someone tells a real knee-slapper.

“Ayuh,” I agreed along with him, “but you know what they say.”

“Nope,” he says. He dropped the eclipse-viewer into his lap n turned to look at me. He’d laughed s’hard there were tears standin in his piggy little bloodshot eyes. “You’re the one with a sayin for every occasion, Dolores. What do they say about husbands who finally put one over on their meddling busybody wives?”

“‘Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me,’ ” I says. “You fooled me about Selena, and then you fooled me about the money, but I guess I finally caught up to you. ”

“Well maybe you did and maybe you didn’t,” he says, “but if you’re worried about it bein spent, you can just stop, because—”

I broke in there. “I ain’t worried,” I says. “I told you that already. I ain’t a bit worried.”

He give me a hard look then, Andy, his smile dryin up little by little. “You got that smart look on your face again,” he says, “the one I don’t much care for. ”

“Tough titty,” I says.

He looked at me for a long time, tryin to figure out what was goin on inside my head, but I guess it was as much a mystery to him then as ever. He pooched his lip out again n sighed so hard he blew back the lock of hair that’d fallen on his forehead.

“Most women don’t understand the first thing about money, Dolores,” he says, “n you’re no exception to the rule. I put it all together in one account, that’s all… so it’d draw more interest. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to listen to a lot of your ignorant bullshit. Well, I’ve had to listen to some anyway, like I just about always do, but enough’s enough.” Then he raised up the eclipse-viewer again to show me the subject was closed.

“One account in your own name,” I says.

“So what?” he ast. By then it was like we was sittin in a deep twilight, and the trees had begun fadin against the horizon. I could hear a whippoorwill singin from behind the house, and a nightjar from somewhere else. It felt