Dolores Claiborne Read Online Free Page A

back some of the money Joe was drinking up through the week and losin in the Friday-night poker games at Fudgy’s Tavern over on the mainland. In those days I still believed the love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man was stronger than the love of drinkin and hell-raisin—that love would eventually rise to the top like cream in a bottle of milk. I learned better over the next ten years. The world’s a sorry schoolroom sometimes, ain’t it?
    “Well,” Vera said, “we’ll give each other a try, Dolores St. George ... although even if you work out, I imagine you’ll be pregnant again in a year or so, and that’s the last I’ll see of you.”
    The fact was I was two months pregnant right then, but wild hosses wouldn’t have dragged that outta me, either. I wanted the ten dollars a week the job paid, and I got it, and you better believe me when I say I earned every red cent of it. I worked my tail off that summer, and when Labor Day rolled around, Vera ast me if I wanted to keep on after they went back to Baltimore—someone has to keep a big place like that up to snuff all the year round, you know—and I said fine.
    I kep at it until a month before Joe Junior was born, and I was back at it even before he was off the titty. In the summer I left him with Arlene Cullum—Vera wouldn’t have a crying baby in the house, not her—but when she and her husband were gone, I’d bring both him and Selena in with me. Selena could be mostly left alone—even at two going on three she could be trusted most of the time. Joe Junior I carted with me on my daily rounds. He took his first steps in the master bedroom, although you can believe Vera never heard of it.
    She called me a week after I delivered (I almost didn’t send her a birth announcement, then decided if she thought I was lookin for a fancy present that was her problem), congratulated me on givin birth to a son, and then said what I think she really called to say—that she was holdin my place for me. I think she intended me to be flattered, and I was. It was about the highest compliment a woman like Vera can pay, and it meant a lot more to me than the twenty-five-dollar bonus check I got in the mail from her in December of that year.
    She was hard but she was fair, and around that house of hers she was always the boss. Her husband wasn’t there but one day in ten anyway, even in the summers when they were supposed to be livin there full-time, but when he was, you still knew who was in charge. Maybe he had two or three hundred executives who dropped their drawers every time he said shit, but Vera was boss of the shootin match on Little Tall Island, and when she told him to take his shoes off and stop trackin dirt on her nice clean carpet, he minded.
    And like I say, she had her ways of doin things. Did she ever! I don’t know where she got her idears, but I do know she was a prisoner of them. If things wasn’t done a certain way, she’d get a headache or one in her gut. She spent so much of her day checkin up on things that I thought plenty of times she would have had more peace of mind if she’d just given over and kep that house herself.
    All the tubs had to be scrubbed out with Spic n Span, that was one thing. No Lestoil, no Top Job, no Mr. Clean. Just Spic n Span. If she caught you scrubbin one of the tubs with anything else, God help you.
    When it came to the ironin, you had to use a special spray-bottle of starch on the collars of the shirts and the blouses, and there was a piece of gauze you were supposed to put over the collar before you sprayed. Friggin gauze didn’t do a goddam thing, so far as I could ever tell, and I must have ironed at least ten thousand shirts and blouses in that house, but if she came into the laundry room and saw you was doin shirts without that little piece of netting on a collar, or at least hung over the end of the ironin board, God help you.
    If you didn’t remember to turn on the exhaust fan in the kitchen when you