Read Dolores Claiborne for Free Online Page B

voice. “I told you that!” And just smiled at me. She didn’t say a word, but she didn’t have to. Her face did all the talkin that needed to be done. I got you, Dolores, it was sayin. I got you good.
    But I wasn’t done. I knew she was holdin onto one gut-buster of a b.m., and I knew there’d be hell to pay if she got a good start before I could get the bedpan under her. So I went downstairs and stood by that vacuum, and I waited five minutes, and then I ran up again. Only that time she didn’t smile at me when I came in. That time she was lyin on her side, fast asleep ... or that was what I thought. I really did. She fooled me good and proper, and you know what they say—fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
    When I went back down the second time, I really did vacuum the parlor. When the job was done, I put the Kirby away and went back to check on her. She was sittin up in bed, wide awake, covers thrown back, her rubber pants pushed down to her big old flabby knees and her diapers undone. Had she made a mess? Great God! The bed was full of shit, she was covered with shit, there was shit on the rug, on the wheelchair, on the walls. There was even shit on the curtains. It looked like she musta taken up a handful and flang it, the way kids’ll fling mud at each other when they’re swimmin in a cowpond.
    Was I mad! Mad enough to spit!
    “Oh, Vera! Oh, you dirty BITCH!” I screamed at her. I never killed her, Andy, but if I was gonna, I would’ve done it that day, when I saw that mess and smelled that room. I wanted to kill her, all right; no use lyin about that. And she just looked at me with that foozled expression she got when her mind was playing tricks on her ... but I could see the devil dancin in her eyes, and I knew well enough who the trick had been played on that time. Fool me twice, shame on me.
    “Who’s that?” she asked. “Brenda, is that you, dear? Have the cows got out again?”
    “You know there ain’t been a cow within three mile of here since 1955!” I hollered. I came across the room, takin great big strides, and that was a mistake, because one of my loafers come down on a turd and I damn near went spang on my back. If I had done, I guess I really might have killed her; I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself. Right then I was ready to plow fire and reap brimstone.
    “I dooon‘t,” she says, tryin to sound like the poor old pitiful lady she really was on a lot of days. “I dooo-ooon’t! I can’t see, and my stomach is so upset. I think I’m going to be whoopsy. Is it you, Dolores?”
    “Coss it’s me, you old bat!” I said, still hollerin at the top of my lungs. “I could just kill you!”
    I imagine by then Susy Proulx and Shawna Wyndham were standin at the foot of the stairs, gettin an earful, and I imagine you’ve already talked to em and that they’ve got me halfway to hung. No need to tell me one way or the other, Andy; awful open, your face is.
    Vera seen she wasn’t fooling me a bit, at least not anymore, so she gave up tryin to make me believe she’d gone into one of her bad times and got mad herself in self-defense. I think maybe I scared her a little, too. Lookin back on it, I scared myself —but Andy, if you’d seen that room! It looked like dinnertime in hell.
    “I guess you’ll do it, too!” she yelled back at me. “Someday you really will, you ugly, bad-natured old harridan! You’ll kill me just like you killed your husband!”
    “No, ma’am,” I said. “Not exactly. When I get ready to settle your hash, I won’t bother makin it look like an accident—I’ll just shove you out the window, and there’ll be one less smelly bitch in the world.”
    I grabbed her around the middle and h’isted her up like I was Superwoman. I felt it in my back that night, I can tell you, and by the next morning I could hardly walk, I was in such pain. I went to that chiropractor in Machias and he did something to it that made it feel a little