Dolores Claiborne Read Online Free PDF

kindling for the kitchen stove (until he died, that is; after that I had the job all to myself, lucky me) and hittin that loudmouth bitch a good lick with it right between the eyes. Sometimes I could actually see myself doin it, that’s how mad she made me, but I guess I always knew there was a part of her that hated yellin down that way as much as I hated hearin it.
    That was the first way she had of bein a bitch —not bein able to help it. It was really worse for her than it was for me, specially after she’d had her bad strokes. There was a lot less warshin to hang out by then, but she was just as crazy on the subject as she’d been before most of the rooms in the house were shut off and most of the guest-beds stripped and the sheets wrapped in plastic and put away in the linen closet.
    What made it hard for her was that by 1985 or so, her days of surprisin folks was through—she had to depend on me just to get around. If I wa‘ant there to lift her out of bed and set her in her wheelchair, in bed she stayed. She’d porked up a lot, you see—went from a hundred and thirty or so in the early sixties to a hundred and ninety, and most of the gain was that yellowish, blubbery fat you see on some old people. It hung off her arms and legs and butt like bread-dough on a stick. Some people get thin as jerky in their sundown years, but not Vera Donovan. Dr. Freneau said it was because her kidneys weren’t doin their job. I s’pose so, but I had plenty of days when I thought she put on that weight just to spite me.
    The weight wasn’t all, either; she was halfway to bein blind, as well. The strokes done that. What eyesight she had left came and went. Some days she could see a little bit out of her left eye and pretty damned good out of the right one, but most times she said it was like lookin through a heavy gray curtain. I guess you can understand why it drove her crazy, her that was such a one to always keep her eye on everythin. A few times she even cried over it, and you want to believe that it took a lot to make a hard baby like her to cry ... and even after the years had beat her to her knees, she was still a hard baby.
    What, Frank?
    Senile?
    I dunno for sure, and that’s the truth. I don’t think so. And if she was, it sure wasn’t in the ordinary way old folks go senile. And I’m not just sayin that because if it turns out she was, the judge in charge of probatin her will’s apt to use it to blow his nose with. He can wipe his ass with it, for all of me; all I want’s to get outta this friggin mess she’s landed me in. But I still gotta say she probably wa’ant completely vacant upstairs, not even at the end. A few rooms to rent, maybe, but not completely vacant.
    The main reason I say so was she had days when she was almost as sharp as ever. They were usually the same days when she could see a little, and help you to sit her up in bed, or maybe even take those two steps from the bed to the wheelchair instead of having to be hoisted across like a bag of grain. I’d put her in the wheelchair so I could change her bed, and she wanted to be in it so she could go over to her window—the one that looked out on the side yard and the harbor view beyond that. She told me once that she’d go out of her mind for good if she had to lay in bed all day and all night, with nothing but the ceiling and the walls to look at, and I believed her.
    She had her confused days, yes—days when she didn’t know who I was, and hardly even who she was. On those days she was like a boat that’s come loose from its moorins, except the ocean she was adrift on was time—she was apt to think it was 1947 in the mornin and 1974 in the afternoon. But she had good days, too. There were less of them as time went on and she kept havin those little strokes—shocks, the old folks call em—but she did have em. Her good days was often my bad ones, though, because she’d get up to all her old bitchery if I let her.
    She’d get mean. That