Dolores Claiborne Read Online Free PDF Page B

was the second way she had of bein a bitch. That woman could be as mean as cat-dirt when she wanted to. Even stuck in a bed most of the time, wearin diapers and rubber pants, she could be a real stinker. The messes she made on cleanin days is as good an example of what I mean as anything. She didn’t make em every week, but by God I’ll tell you that she made em on Thursdays too often for it to be just a coincidence.
    Thursdays was cleanin day at the Donovans’. It’s a huge house—you don’t have any idear until you’re actually wanderin around inside it—but most of it’s closed off. The days when there might be half a dozen girls with their hair done up in kerchiefs, polishin here and warshin windows there and dustin cobwebs outta the ceiling corners somewhere else, are twenty years or more in the past. I have walked through those gloomy rooms sometimes, lookin at the furniture swaddled up in dust-sheets, and thought of how the place used to look back in the fifties, when they had their summer parties—there was always different-colored Japanese lanterns on the lawn, how well I remember that!—and I get the funniest chill. In the end the bright colors always go out of life, have you ever noticed that? In the end things always look gray, like a dress that’s been warshed too many times.
    For the last four years, the open part of the house has been the kitchen, the main parlor, the dinin room, the sun-room that looks out on the pool and the patio, and four bedrooms upstairs—hers, mine, and the two guest-rooms. The guest-rooms weren’t heated much in wintertime, but they were kept nice in case her children did come to spend some time.
    Even in these last few years I always had two girls from town who helped me on cleanin days. There’s always been a pretty lively turnover there, but since 1990 or so it’s been Shawna Wyndham and Frank’s sister Susy. I couldn’t do it without em, but I still do a lot of it m‘self, and by the time the girls go home at four on Thursday afternoons, I’m ’bout dead on my feet. There’s still a lot to do, though—the last of the ironin, Friday’s shoppin list to write out, and Her Nibs’ supper to get, accourse. No rest for the wicked, as they say.
    Only before any of those things, like as not, there’d be some of her bitchery to sort out.
    She was regular about her calls of nature most of the time. I’d slip the bedpan under her every three hours, and she’d do a tinkle for me. And on most days there was apt to be a clinker in the pan along with the pee after the noon call.
    Except on Thursdays, that is.
    Not every Thursday, but on the Thursdays when she was bright, I could count on trouble more often than not ... and on a backache that’d keep me awake until midnight. Even Anacin-3 wouldn’t ease it at the end. I’ve been healthy as a horse most of my life and I’m still healthy as a horse, but sixty-five is sixty-five. You can’t shake things off the way you once could.
    On Thursday, instead of gettin half a bedpan filled with pee at six in the morning, I’d get just a dribble. The same thing at nine. And at noon, instead of some pee and a clinker, there was apt to be nothing at all. I’d know then I might be in for it. The only times I absolutely knew I was in for it were the times when I hadn’t gotten a clinker out of her Wednesday noon, either.
    I see you tryin not to laugh, Andy, but that’s all right—you let it out if you have to. It wasn’t no laughing matter then, but it’s over now, and what you’re thinkin ain’t nothin but the truth. The dirty old bag had her a shit savings account, and it was like some weeks she banked it in order to collect the interest ... only I was the one who got all the withdrawals. I got em whether I wanted em or not.
    I spent most of my Thursday afternoons runnin upstairs, tryin to catch her in time, and sometimes I even did. But whatever the state of her eyes might be, there was nothing wrong with her ears, and