Dolores Claiborne

her would most likely go up with every dollar she left me, n I wanted to know how bad I was gonna get hurt. I thought it might be as much as sixty or seventy thousand dollars… although he had said she left some money to an orphanage, and I figured that’d take it down some.

There was somethin else bitin me, too—bitin the way a June deerfly does when it settles on the back of your neck. Somethin way wrong about the whole proposition. I couldn’t put m‘finger on it, though—no more’n I’d been able to put m’finger on exactly who Greenbush was when his secretary first said his name.

He said somethin I couldn’t quite make out. It sounded like blub-dub-a-gub-area-of-thirty- million-dollars.

“What did you say, sir?” I ast.

“That after probate, legal fees, and a few other small deductions, the total should be in the area of thirty million dollars.”

My hand on the telephone had started to feel the way it does when I wake up n realize I slep most of the night on it… numb through the middle n all tingly around the edges. My feet were tinglin, too, n all at once the world felt like it was made of glass again.

“I’m sorry,” I says. I could hear my mouth talkin perfectly well n perfectly clear, but I didn’t seem to be attached to any of the words that were comin out of it. It was just flappin, like a shutter in a high wind. “The connection here isn’t very good. I thought you said somethin with the word million in it. Then I laughed, just to show how silly I knew that was, but part of me must’ve thought it wa’ant silly at all, because that was the fakestsoundin laugh I ever heard come outta me—Yar-yar-yar, it sounded like.

“I did say million,” he said. “In fact, I said thirty million. And do you know, I think he woulda chuckled if it hadn’t been Vera Donovan’s dead body I was gettin that money over. I think he was excited—that underneath that dry, prissy voice he was excited as hell. I s’pose he felt like John Bears-ford Tipton, the rich fella who used to give away a million bucks at a crack on that old TV show. He wanted my business, accourse that was part of it—I got a feelin that money’s like electric trains to fellas like him n he didn’t want to see such an almighty big set as Vera’s taken away from him—but I think most of the fun of it for him was just hearin me flub-dubbin around like I was doin.

“I don’t get it,” I says, and now my voice was so weak I could hardly hear it myself.

“I think I understand how you feel,” he says. “It’s a very large sum, and of course it will take a little getting used to. ”

“How much is it really?” I ast him, and that time he did chuckle. If he’d been where I coulda got to him, Andy, I believe I woulda booted him in the seat of the pants.

He told me again, thirty million dollars, n I kep thinkin that if my hand got any stupider, I was gonna drop the phone. And I started to feel panicky. It was like someone was inside my head, swingin a steel cable around n around. I’d think thirty million dollars, but those were just words. When I tried to see what they meant, the only pitcher I could make inside my head was like the ones in the Scrooge McDuck comic books Joe Junior used to read Little Pete when Pete was four or five. I saw a great big vault fulla coins n bills, only instead of Scrooge McDuck paddlin around in all that dough with the spats on his flippers n those little round spectacles perched on his beak, I’d see me doin it in my bedroom slippers. Then that pitcher’d slip away and I’d think of how Sammy Marchant’s eyes had looked when they moved from the rollin pin to me n then back to the rollin pin again. They looked like Selena’s had looked that day in the garden, all dark n full of questions. Then I thought of the woman who called on the phone n said there were still decent Christians on the island who didn’t have to live with murderers. I wondered what that woman n her friends were gonna think when they found out Vera’s death had left me thirty million dollars to the good… and the thought of that came close to puttin me into a panic.

“You can’t do it!” I says, kinda wild. “Do you hear me? You can’t make me take it!”

Then it was his turn to say he couldn’t quite hear—that the connection must be loose someplace along the line. I ain’t a bit surprised, either. When a man like Greenbush hears someone sayin they don’t want a thirty-million-dollar lump of cash, they figure the equipment must be frigged up. I opened my mouth to tell him again that he’d have to take it back, that he could give every cent of it to The New England Home for Little Wanderers, when I suddenly understood what was wrong with all this. It didn’t just hit me; it come down on my head like a dropped load of bricks.

“Donald n Helga!” I says. I musta sounded like a TV game-show contestant comin up with the right answer in the last second or two of the bonus round.

“I beg pardon?” he asks, kinda cautious.

“Her kids!” I says. “Her son and her daughter! That money belongs to them, not me! They’re kin! I ain’t nothing but a jumped-up housekeeper!”

There was such a long pause then that I felt sure we musta been disconnected, and I wa’ant a bit sorry. I felt faint, to tell you the truth. I was about to hang up when he says in this flat, funny voice, “You don’t know. ”

“Don’t know what?” I shouted at him. “I know she’s got a son named Donald and a daughter named Helga! I know they was too damned good to come n visit her up here, although she always kep space for em, but I guess they won’t be too good to divide up a pile like the one you’re talkin about now that she’s dead!”

“You don’t know,” he said again. And then, as if he was askin questions to himself instead of to me, he says, “Could you not know, after all the time you worked for her? Could you? Wouldn’t Kenopensky have told you?” N before I could get a word in edgeways, he started answerin his own damned questions. “Of course it’s possible. Except for a squib on an inside page of the local paper the day after, she kept the whole thing under wraps—you could do that thirty years ago, if you were willing to pay for the privilege. I’m not sure there were even obituaries.” He stopped, then says, like a man will when he’s just discoverin somethin new—somethin huge—about someone he’s known all his life: “She talked about them as if they were alive, didn’t she. All these years!”

“What are you globberin about?” I shouted at him. It felt like an elevator was goin down in my stomach, and all at once all sorts of things—little things—started fittin together in my mind. I didn’t want em to, but it went on happenin, just the same.

“Accourse she talked about em like they were alive! They are alive! He’s got a real estate company in Arizona—Golden West Associates! She designs dresses in San Francisco… Gaylord Fashions!”

Except she’d always read these big paperback historical novels with women in low-cut dresses kissin men without their shirts on, and the trade name for those books was Golden West—it said so on a little foil strip at the top of every one. And it all at once occurred to me that she’d been born in a little town called Gaylord, Missouri. I wanted to think it was somethin else—Galen, or maybe Galesburg—but I knew it wasn’t. Still, her daughter mighta named her dress business after the town her mother’d been born in… or so I told myself.

“Miz Claiborne,” Greenbush says, talkin in a low, sorta anxious voice, “Mrs. Donovan’s husband was killed in an unfortunate accident when Donald was fifteen and Helga was thirteen—”

“I know that!” I says, like I wanted him to believe that if I knew that I must know everything.

“—and there was consequently a great deal of bad feeling between Mrs. Donovan and the children.”

I’d known that, too. I remembered people remarkin on how quiet the kids had been when they showed up on Memorial Day in 1961 for their usual summer on the island, and how several people’d mentioned that you didn’t ever seem to see the three of em together anymore, which was especially strange, considerin Mr. Donovan’s sudden death the year before; usually somethin like that draws people closer… although I s’pose city folks may be a little different about such things. And then I remembered somethin else, somethin Jimmy DeWitt told me in the fall of that year.

“They had a wowser of an argument in a restaurant just after the Fourth of July in ’61,” I says. “The boy n girl left the next day. I remember the hunky—Kenopensky, I mean—takin em across to the mainland in the big motor launch they had back then.”

“Yes,” Greenbush said. “It so happens that I knew from Ted Kenopensky what that argument was about. Donald had gotten his driver’s license that spring, and Mrs. Donovan had gotten him a car for his birthday. The girl,