Dolores Claiborne Read Online Free

Vera’s rule, and it sat all right with me. I thought it was hard, but I thought it was fair. If you was told twice which racks she wanted the bakin put on after it came out of the oven, and not ever to stick it on the kitchen windowsills to cool like shanty Irish would do, and if you still couldn’t remember, the chances were good you wasn’t never going to remember.
    Three strikes and you’re out was the rule, there was absolutely no exceptions to it, and I worked with a lot of different people in that house over the years because of it. I heard it said more’n once in the old days that workin for the Donovans was like steppin into one of those revolvin doors. You might get one spin, or two, and some folks went around as many as ten times or a dozen, but you always got spat out onto the sidewalk in the end. So when I went to work for her in the first place—this was in 1949—I went like you’d go into a dragon’s cave. But she wasn’t as bad as people liked to make out. If you kept your ears open, you could stay. I did, and the hunky did, too. But you had to stay on your toes all the time, because she was sharp, because she always knew more of what was going on with the island folk than any of the other summer people did ... and because she could be mean. Even back then, before all her other troubles befell her, she could be mean. It was like a hobby with her.
    “What are you doing here?” she says to me on that first day. “Shouldn’t you be home minding that new baby of yours and making nice big dinners for the light of your life?”
    “Mrs. Cullum’s happy to watch Selena four hours a day,” I said. “Part-time is all I can take, ma’am.”
    “Part-time is all I need, as I believe my advertisement in the local excuse for a newspaper said,” she comes right back—just showin me the edge of that sharp tongue of hers, not actually cuttin me with it like she would so many times later. She was knittin that day, as I remember. That woman could knit like a flash—a whole pair of socks in a single day was no problem for her, even if she started as late as ten o’clock. But she said she had to be in the mood.
    “Yessum,” I said. “It did.”
    “My name isn’t Yessum,” she said, putting her knitting down. “It’s Vera Donovan. If I hire you, you’ll call me Missus Donovan—at least until we know each other well enough to make a change—and I’ll call you Dolores. Is that clear?”
    “Yes, Missus Donovan,” I said.
    “All right, we’re off to a good start. Now answer my question. What are you doing here when you’ve got a house of your own to keep, Dolores?”
    “I want to earn a little extra money for Christmas,” I said. I’d already decided on my way over I’d say that if she asked. “And if I’m satisfactory until then—and if I like working for you, of course—maybe I’ll stay on a little longer.”
    “If you like working for me,” she repeats back, then rolls her eyes like it was the silliest thing she’d ever heard—how could anybody not like working for the great Vera Donovan? Then she repeats back, “Christmas money.” She takes a pause, lookin at me the whole time, then says it again, even more sarcastic. “Kuh-risss-mas money!”
    Like she suspected I was really there because I barely had the rice shook out of my hair and was havin marriage troubles already, and she only wanted to see me blush and drop my eyes to know for sure. So I didn’t blush and I didn’t drop my eyes, although I was only twenty-two and it was a near thing. Nor would I have admitted to a single soul that I was already havin trouble—wild hosses wouldn’t have dragged it out of me. Christmas money was good enough for Vera, no matter how sarcastic she might say it, and all I’d allow to myself was that the house-money was a little tight that summer. It was only years later that I could admit the real reason why I went up to face the dragon in her den that day: I had to find a way to put