Dolores Claiborne Read Free Page A

done it summers for the family since 1950, and I s’pose it was natural enough for her to call me before she called anyone else, but at the time it seemed like the answer to all my prayers.
    I said yes right on the spot, and I worked for her right up until yest’y forenoon, when she went down the front stairs on her stupid empty head.
    What was it her husband did, Andy? Made airplanes, didn’t he?
    Oh. Ayuh, I guess I did hear that, but you know how people on the island talk. All I know for sure is that they was well-fixed, mighty well-fixed, and she got it all when he died. Except for what the government took, accourse, and I doubt if it got anywhere near as much as it was probably owed. Michael Donovan was sharp as a tack. Sly, too. And although nobody would believe it from the way she was over the last ten years, Vera was as sly as he was ... and she had her sly days right up until she died. I wonder if she knew what kind of a jam she’d be leavin me in if she did anything besides die in bed of a nice quiet heart-attack? I been down by East Head most of the day, sittin on those rickety stairs and thinkin about that ... that and a few hundred other things. First I’d think no, a bowl of oatmeal has more brains than Vera Donovan had at the end, and then I’d remember how she was about the vacuum cleaner and I’d think maybe ... yes, maybe ...
    But it don’t matter now. The only thing that matters now is that I have flopped out of the frying pan and into the fire, and I’d dearly love to drag myself clear before my ass gets burned any worse. If I still can.
    I started off as Vera Donovan’s housekeeper, and I ended up bein something they call a “paid companion.” It didn’t take me too long to figure out the difference. As Vera’s housekeeper, I had to eat shit eight hours a day, five days a week. As her paid companion, I had to eat it around the clock.
    She had her first stroke in the summer of 1968, while she was watchin the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on her television. That was just a little one, and she used to blame it on Hubert Humphrey. “I finally looked at that happy asshole one too many times,” she said, “and I popped a goddam blood-vessel. I should have known it was gonna happen, and it could just as easily have been Nixon.”
    She had a bigger one in 1975, and that time she didn’t have no politicians to blame it on. Dr. Freneau told her she better quit smokin and drinkin, but he could have saved his breath—no high-steppin kitty like Vera Kiss-My-Back-Cheeks Donovan was going to listen to a plain old country doctor like Chip Freneau. “I’ll bury him,” she used to say, “and have a Scotch and soda sitting on his headstone. ”
    For awhile it seemed like maybe she would do just that—he kept scoldin her, and she kept sailin along like the Queen Mary. Then, in 1981, she had her first whopper, and the hunky got killed in a car-wreck over on the mainland the very next year. That was when I moved in with her—October of 1982.
    Did I have to? I dunno. I guess not. I had my Sociable Security, as old Hattie McLeod used to call it. It wasn’t much, but the kids were long gone by then—Litt!e Pete right off the face of the earth, poor little lost lamb—and I had managed to put a few dollars away, too. Living on the island has always been cheap, and while it ain’t what it once was, it’s still a whale of a lot cheaper than livin on the mainland. So I guess I didn’t have to go live with Vera, no.
    But by then her and me was used to each other. It’s hard to explain to a man. I ‘spect Nancy there with her pads n pens n tape-recorder understands, but I don’t think she’s s’posed to talk. We was used to each other in the way I s‘pose two old bats can get used to hangin upside-down next to each other in the same cave, even though they’re a long way from what you’d call the best of friends. And it wasn’t really no big change. Hanging my Sunday clothes in the