Dolores Claiborne(40)

'What is the point, then?' she asked me. The afghan square she was workin on was almost done - her fingers were about the quickest I've ever seen.

'He's done everything but rape his own daughter,' I says. 'He's scared her so bad she may never get all the way over it, and he's paid himself a reward of purt-near three thousand dollars for his own bad behavior. I ain't gonna let him get away with it - that's the friggin point.'

'Is it?' she says in that mild voice of hers, and her needles went click-click-click, and the rain went rollin down the windowpanes, and the shadows wiggled n squiggled on her cheek and forehead like black veins. Lookin at her that way made me think of a story my grandmother used to tell about the three sisters in the stars who knit our lives . . . one to spin and one to hold and one to cut off each thread whenever the fancy takes her. I think that last one's name was Atropos. Even if it's not, that name has always given me the shivers.

'Yes,' I says to her, 'but I'll be goddamned if I see a way to do him the way he deserves to be done.'

Click-click-click. There was a cup of tea beside her, and she paused long enough to have a sip. There'd come a time when she'd like as not try to drink her tea through her right ear n give herself a Tetley shampoo, but on that fall day in 1962 she was still as sharp as my father's cutthroat razor. When she looked at me, her eyes seemed to bore a hole right through to the other side.

'What's the worst of it, Dolores?' she says finally, puttin her cup down and pickin up her knittin again. 'What would you say is the worst? Not for Selena or the boys, but for you?'

I didn't even have to stop n think about it. 'That sonofawhore's laughin at me,' I says. 'That's the worst of it for me. I see it in his face sometimes. I never told him so, but he knows I checked at the bank, he knows damned well, and he knows what I found out.'

'That could be just your imagination,' she says.

'I don't give a frig if it is,' I shot right back. 'It's how I feel.'

'Yes,' she Says, 'it's how you feel that's important. I agree. Go on, Dolores.'

What do you mean, go on? I was gonna say. That's all there is. But I guess it wasn't, because somethin else popped out, just like Jack out of his box. 'He wouldn't be laughin at me,' I says, 'if he knew how close I've come to stoppin his clock for good a couple of times.'

She just sat there lookin at me, those dark thin shadows chasm each other down her face and gettin in her eyes so I couldn't read em, and I thought of the ladies who spin in the stars again. Especially the one who holds the shears.

'I'm scared,' I says. 'Not of him - of myself. If I don't get the kids away from him soon, somethin bad is gonna happen. I know it is. There's a thing inside me, and it's gettin worse.'

'Is it an eye?' she ast calmly, and such a chill swept over me then! It was like she'd found a window in my skull and used it to peek right into my thoughts. 'Something like an eye?'

'How'd you know that?' I whispered, and as I sat there my arms broke out in goosebumps n I started to shiver.

'I know,' she says, and starts knittin a fresh row. 'I know all about it, Dolores.'

'Well . . . I'm gonna do him in if I don't watch out. That's what I'm afraid of. Then I can forget all about that money. I can forget all about every-thin.'

'Nonsense,' she says, and the needles went click-click-click in her lap. 'Husbands die every day, Dolores. Why, one is probably dying right now, while we're sitting here talking. They die and leave their wives their money.' She finished her row and looked up at me but I still couldn't see what was in her eyes because of the shadows the rain made. They went creepin and crawlin all acrost her face like snakes. 'I should know, shouldn't I?' she says. 'After all, look what happened to mine.'

I couldn't say nothing. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth like an inchbug to flypaper.

'An accident,' she says in a clear voice almost like a schoolteacher's, 'is sometimes an unhappy woman's best friend.'

'What do you mean?' I asked. It was only a whisper, but I was a little surprised to find I could even get that out.

'Why, whatever you think,' she says. Then she grinned - not a smile but a grin. To tell you the truth, Andy, that grin chilled my blood. 'You just want to remember that what's yours is his and what's his is yours. If he had an accident, for instance, the money he's holding in his bank accounts would become yours. It's the law in this great country of ours.

Her eyes fastened on mine, and for just a second there the shadows were gone and I could see clear into them. What I saw made me look away fast. On the outside, Vera was just as cool as a baby sittin on a block of ice, but inside the temperature looked to be quite a bit hotter; about as hot as it gets in the middle of a forest fire, I'd say at a guess. Too hot for the likes of me to look at for long, that's for sure.

'The law is a great thing, Dolores,' she says. 'And when a bad man has a bad accident, that can sometimes be a great thing, too.'

'Are you sayin - ' I begun. I was able to get a little above a whisper by then, but not much.

'I'm not saying anything,' she says. Back in those days, when Vera decided she was done with a subject, she slammed it closed like a book. She stuck her knittin back in her basket and got up. 'I'll tell you this, though - that bed's never going to get made with you sitting on it. I'm going down and put on the tea-kettle. Maybe when you get done here, you'd like to come down and try a slice of the apple pie I brought over from the mainland. If you're lucky, I might even add a scoop of vanilla ice cream.'