Read Online Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page B

n Joe, too—some before he died and even more after. Out here in the boondocks about the most int’restin thing a person can do is die sudden, did you ever notice that?
    So here we are at Joe.
    I been dreadin this part, and I guess there’s no use lyin about it. I already told you I killed him, so that’s over with, but the hard part is still all ahead: how ... and why ... and when it had to be.
    I been thinkin about Joe a lot today, Andy—more about him than about Vera, truth to tell. I kep tryin to remember just why I married him in the first place, for one thing, and at first I couldn’t do it. After awhile I got into a kind of panic about it, like Vera when she’d get the idear there was a snake inside her pillowslip. Then I realized what the trouble was—I was lookin for the love part, like I was one of those foolish little girls Vera used to hire in June and then fire before the summer was halfway done because they couldn’t keep to her rules. I was lookin for the love part, and there was precious little of that even back in 1945, when I was eighteen and he was nineteen and the world was new.
    You know the only thing that come to me while I was out there on the steps today, freezin my tookus off and tryin to remember about the love part? He had a nice forehead. I sat near him in study-hall back when we was in high school together—during World War II, that was—and I remember his forehead, how smooth it looked, without a single pimple on it. There were some on his cheeks and chin, and he was prone to black-heads on the sides of his nose, but his forehead looked as smooth as cream. I remember wantin to touch it ... dreamin about touchin it, to tell the truth; wantin to see if it was as smooth as it looked. And when he asked me to the Junior-Senior Prom, I said yes, and I got my chance to touch his forehead, and it was every bit as smooth as it looked, with his hair goin back from it in these nice smooth waves. Me strokin his hair and his smooth forehead in the dark while the band inside the ballroom of The Samoset Inn played “Moonlight Cocktail” ... After a few hours of sittin on those damned rickety steps and shiverin, that came back to me, at least, so you see there was a little something there, after all. Accourse I found m’self touchin a lot more than just his forehead before too many more weeks had passed, and that was where I made my mistake.
    Now let’s get one thing straight—I ain’t tryin to say I ended up spendin the best years of my life with that old rumpot just because I liked the look of his forehead in period seven study-hall when the light came slantin in on it. Shit, no. But I am tryin to tell you that’s all the love part I was able to remember today, and that makes me feel bad. Sittin out on the stairs today by the East Head, thinkin over those old times ... that was damned hard work. It was the first time I saw that I might have sold myself cheap, and maybe I did it because I thought cheap was the best the likes of me could expect to get for herself. I know it was the first time I dared to think that I deserved to be loved more’n Joe St. George could love anybody (except himself, maybe). You mightn’t think a hard-talking old bitch like me believes in love, but the truth is it’s just about the only thing I do believe in.
    It didn’t have much to do with why I married him, though—I got to tell you that straight out. I had six weeks’ worth of baby girl in my belly when I told him I did n I would, until death do us part. And that was the smartest part of it ... sad but true. The rest of it was all the usual stupid reasons, and one thing I’ve learned in my life is that stupid reasons make stupid marriages.
    I was tired of fightin with my mother.
    I was tired of bein scolded by my father.
    All my friends was doin it, they was gettin homes of their own, and I wanted to be a grownup like them; I was tired of bein a silly little girl.
    He said he wanted me, and I believed