Dolores Claiborne(31)

His eyes went down to narrow little slits and he said I'd better not fool with him. 'You've done it before,' he says, 'but that don't mean you can bell the cat every time you want to.'

I'd been thinkin that very thing myself, and not so long before, but that wasn't hardly the time to tell him so. 'You can save your big talk for your friends,' I says instead. 'What you want to do right now isn't talk but listen . . . and hear what I say, because I mean every word. If you ever fool with Selena again, I'll see you in State Prison for molesting a child or statutory rape, whichever charge will keep you in cold storage the longest.'

That flummoxed him. His mouth fell open again and he just sat there for a minute, starin up at me.

'You'd never,' he begun, and then stopped. Because he seen that I would. So he went into a pet, with his lower lip poochin out farther than ever. 'You take her part, don't you?' he says. 'You never even ast for my side of it, Dolores.'

'Do you have one?' I asked him back. 'When a man just four years shy of forty asks his fourteen-year-old daughter to take off her underpants so he can see how much hair she has grown on her pu**y, can you say that man has a side?'

'She'll be fifteen next month,' he says, as if that somehow changed everything. He was a piece of work, all right.

'Do you hear yourself?' I asked him. 'Do you hear what's runnin out of your own mouth?'

He stared at me a little longer, then bent over and picked his newspaper up off the floor. 'Leave me alone, Dolores,' he says in his best sulky poor-old-me voice. 'I want to finish this article.'

I felt like tearin the damned paper out of his hands and throwin it in his face, but there would have been a blood-flowin tussle for sure if I had, and I didn't want the kids - especially not Selena - comin in on somethin like that. So I just reached out and pulled down the top of it, gentle, with my thumb.

'First you're gonna promise me you'll leave Selena alone,' I said, 'so we can put this shit-miserable business behind us. You promise me you ain't gonna touch her that way ever again in your life.'

'Dolores, you ain't -' he starts.

'Promise, Joe, or I'll make your life hell.'

'You think that scares me?' he shouts. 'You've made my life hell for the last fifteen years, you bitch - your ugly face can't hold a candle to your ugly disposition! If you don't like the way I am, blame yourself!'

'You don't know what hell is,' I said, 'but if you don't promise to leave her alone, I'll see you find out.'

'All right!' he yells. 'All right, I promise! There! Done! Are you satisfied?'

'Yes,' I says, although I wasn't. He wasn't ever gonna be able to satisfy me again. It wouldn't have mattered if he'd worked the miracle of the loaves and fishes. I meant to get the kids out of that house or see him dead before the turn of the year. Which way it went didn't make much difference to me, but I didn't want him to know somethin was comin his way until it was too late for him to do anythin about it.

'Good,' he says. 'Then we're all done and buttoned up, ain't we, Dolores?' But he was lookin at me with a funny little gleam in his eyes that I didn't much like. 'You think you're pretty smart, don't you?'

'I dunno,' I says. 'I used to think I had a fair amount of intelligence, but look who I ended up keepin house with.'

'Oh, come on,' he says, still lookin at me in that funny half-wise way. 'You think you're such hot shit you prob'ly look over your shoulder to make sure your ass ain't smokin before you wipe yourself. But you don't know everything.'

'What do you mean by that?'

'You figure it out,' he says, and shakes his paper out like some rich guy who wants to make sure the stock market didn't use him too bad that day. 'It shouldn't be no trouble for a smartypants like you.

I didn't like it, but I let it go. Partly it was because I didn't want to spend any more time knockin a stick against a hornet's nest than I had to, but that wasn't all of it. I did think I was smart, smarter'n him, anyway, and that was the rest of it. I figured if he tried to get his own back on me, I'd see what he was up to about five minutes after he got started. It was pride, in other words, pride pure n simple, and the idea that he'd already got started never crossed my mind.

When the kids came back from the store, I sent the boys into the house and walked around to the back with Selena. There's a big tangle of blackberry bushes there, mostly bare by that time of the year. A little breeze had come up, and it made them rattle. It was a lonesome sound. A little creepy, too. There's a big white stone stickin out of the ground there, and we sat down on it. A half-moon had risen over East Head, and when she took my hands, her fingers were just as cold as that half-moon looked.

'I don't dare go in, Mommy,' she said, and her voice was tremblin. 'I'll go to Tanya's, all right? Please say I can.'

'You don't have to be afraid of a thing, sweetheart,' I says. 'It's all taken care of.'

'I don't believe you,' she whispered, although her face said she wanted to - her face said she wanted to believe it more than anythin.

'It's true,' I said. 'He's promised to leave you alone. He doesn't always keep his promises, but he'll keep this one, now that he knows I'm watchin and he can't count on you to keep quiet. Also, he's scared to death.'