Dolores Claiborne(33)

Once I got settled, I could start puttin back the money I'd had to take, and I thought I could do it. Even if I couldn't, they was bright kids, and I knew there were such things as scholarships. If they missed out on those, I decided I wasn't too proud to fill out a few loan applications. The major thing was to get them away - right then doin that seemed a lot more important than college. First things first, as the bumper sticker on Joe's old Farmall tractor used to say.

I've run m'gums for pretty near three-quarters of an hour about Selena, but it wasn't only her who'd suffered from him. She got the worst of it, but there was plenty of black weather left over for Joe Junior. He was twelve in 1962, a prime age for a boy, but you wouldn't know it lookin at him. He hardly ever smiled or laughed, and it really wasn't any wonder. He'd no more'n come into the room and his Dad'd be on him like a weasel on a chicken, tellin him to tuck in his shirt, to comb his hair, to quit slouchin, to grow up, stop actin like a goddam sissy with his nose always stuck in a book, to be a man. When Joe Junior didn't make the Little League All-Star team the summer before I found out what was wrong with Selena, you would have thought, listenin to his father, that he'd been kicked off the Olympic track team for takin pep-pills. Add to that whatever he'd seen his father gettin up to with his big sister, and you got a real mess on your hands, Sunny Jim. I'd sometimes look at Joe Junior lookin at his father and see real hate in that boy's face - hate, pure n simple. And durin the week or two before I went across to the mainland with those passbooks in my pocket, I realized that, when it came to his father, Joe Junior had his own inside eye.

Then there was Little Pete. By the time he was four, he'd go swaggerin around right behind Joe, with the waist of his pants pulled up like Joe wore his, and he'd pull at the end of his nose and his ears, just like Joe did. Little Pete didn't have any hairs there to pull, accourse, so he'd just pretend. On his first day at first grade, he come home snivellin, with dirt on the seat of his pants and a scratch on his cheek. I sat down beside him on the porch step, put my arm around his shoulders, and asked him what happened. He said that goddam little sheeny Dicky O'Hara pushed him down. I told him goddam was swearin and he shouldn't say it, then asked him if he knew what a sheeny was. I was pretty curious to hear what might pop out of his mouth, to tell you the truth.

'Sure I do,' he says. 'A sheeny's a stupid jerk like Dicky O'Hara.' I told him no, he was wrong, and he asked me what it did mean, then. I told him to never mind, it wasn't a nice word and I didn't want him sayin it anymore. He just sat there glarin at me with his lip pooched out. He looked just like his old man. Selena was scared of her father, Joe Junior hated him, but in some ways it was Little Pete who scared me the most, because Little Pete wanted to grow up to be just like him.

So I got their passbooks from the bottom drawer of my little jewelry box (I kep em there because it was the only thing I had in those days with a lock on it; I wore the key around my neck on a chain) and walked into the Coastal Northern Bank in Jonesport at about half-past noon. When I got to the front of the line, I pushed the passbooks across to the teller, said I meant to close all three accounts out, and explained how I wanted the money.

'That'll be just a moment, Mrs St George,' she says, and goes to the back of the tellers' area to pull the accounts. This was long before computers, accourse, and they had to do a lot more fiddlin and diddlin.

She got em - I saw her pull all three - and then she opened em up and looked at em. A little line showed up down the middle of her brow, and she said somethin to one of the other women. Then they both looked for awhile, with me standin out there on the other side of the counter, watchin em and tellin myself there wasn't a reason in the world to feel nervous and feelin pretty goddam nervous just the same.

Then, instead of comm back to me, the teller went into one of those jumped-up little cubbyholes they called offices. It had glass sides, and I could see her talkin to a little bald man in a gray suit and black tie. When she came back to the counter, she didn't have the account files anymore. She'd left them on the bald fella's desk.

'I think you'd better discuss your children's savings accounts with Mr Pease, Mrs St George,' she says, and pushes the passbooks back to me. She did it with the side of her hand, like they were germy and she might get infected if she touched em too much or too long.

Chapter Eight

'Why?' I asked. 'What's wrong with em?' By then I'd given up the notion that I didn't have anythin to feel nervous about. My heart was rappin away double-time in my chest and my mouth had gone all dry.

'Really, I couldn't say, but I'm sure that if there's a misunderstanding, Mr Pease will straighten it right out,' she says, but she wouldn't look me in the eye and I could tell she didn't think any such thing.

I walked to that office like I had a twenty-pound cake of cement on each foot. I already had a pretty good idear of what must have happened, but I didn't see how in the world it could have happened. Gorry, I had the passbooks, didn't I? Joe hadn't got em outta my jewelry box and then put em back, either, because the lock woulda been busted and it wasn't. Even if he'd picked it somehow (which is a laugh; that man couldn't get a forkful of lima beans from his plate to his mouth without droppin half of em in his lap), the passbooks would either show the withdrawals or be stamped ACCOUNT CLOSED in the red ink the bank uses . . . and they didn't show neither one.