Six months after he died, Joe's estate was settled in County Probate. I wa'ant even there. A week or so later I got a paper tellin me that everythin was mine-I could sell it or swap it or drop it in the deep blue sea. When I'd finished goin through what he'd left, I thought the last of those choices looked like the best one. One kinda surprisin thing I discovered, though: if your husband dies sudden, it can come in handy if all his friends were idiots, like Joe's were. I sold the old shortwave radio he'd been tinkerin on for ten years to Norris Pinette for twenty-five dollars, and the three junk trucks settin in the back yard to Tommy Anderson. That fool was more'n glad to have em, and I used the money to buy a “59 Chevy that had wheezy valves but ran good otherwise. I also had Joe's savins passbook made over to me, and re-opened the kids” college accounts.
Oh, and one other thing-in January of 1964, I started goin by my maiden name again. I didn't make no particular fanfare about it, but I was damned if I was gonna drag St George around behind me the rest of my life, like a can tied to a dog's tail. I guess you could say I cut the string holdin the can… but I didn't get rid of him as easy as I got rid of his name, I can tell you that.
Not that I expected to; I'm sixty-five, and I've known for at least fifty of those years that most of what bein human's about is makin choices and payin the bills when they come due. Some of the choices are pretty goddam nasty, but that don't give a person leave to just walk away from em-especially not if that person's got others dependin on her to do for em what they can't do for themselves. In a case like that, you just have to make the best choice you can n then pay the price. For me, the price was a lot of nights when I woke up in a cold sweat from bad dreams n even more when I never got to sleep at all; that and the sound the rock made when it hit him in the face, bustin his skull and his dentures-that sound like a china plate on a brick hearth. I've heard it for thirty years. Sometimes it's what wakes me up, and sometimes it's what keeps me outta sleep and sometimes it surprises me in broad daylight. I might be sweepin the porch at home or polishin the silver at Vera's or sittin down to my lunch with the TV turned to the Oprah show and all at once I'll hear it. That sound. Or the thud when he hit bottom. Or his voice, comm up outta the well:
“Duh-lorrrr-issss.
I don't s'pose those sounds I sometimes hear are so different from whatever it was that Vera really saw when she screamed about the wires in the corners or the dust bunnies under the bed. There were times, especially after she really began to fail, when I'd crawl in bed with her n hold her n think of the sound the rock made, n then close my eyes n see a china plate strikin a brick hearth and shatterin all to bits. When I saw that I'd hug her like she was my sister, or like she was myself. We'd lie in that bed, each with her own fright, and finally we'd drowse off together-her with me to keep the dust bunnies away, and me with her to keep away the sound of the china plate-and sometimes before I went to sleep I'd think, “This is how. This is how you pay off bein a bitch. And it ain't no use saym if you hadn't been a bitch you wouldn't've had to pay, because sometimes the world makes you be a bitch. When it's all doom n dark outside and only you inside to first make a light n then tend it, you have to be a bitch. But oh, the price. The terrible price.”
Andy, do you s'pose I could have one more tiny little nip from that bottle of yours? I'll never tell a soul.
Thank you. And thank you, Nancy Bannister, for puttin up with such a long-winded old broad as me. How your fingers holdin out?
Are they? Good. Don't lose your courage now; I've gone at it widdershins, I know, but I guess I've finally gotten around to the part you really want to hear about, just the same. That's good, because it's late and I'm tired. I've been workin my whole life, but I can't remember ever bein as tired as I am right now.
I was out hangin laundry yest'y mornin-it seems like six years ago, but it was only yest'y-and Vera was havin one of her bright days. That's why it was all so unexpected, and partly why I got so flustered. When she had her bright days she sometimes got bitchy, but that was the first n last time she got crazy.
So I was down below in the side yard and she was up above in her wheelchair, supervisin the operation the way she liked to do. Every now n then she'd holler down, “Six pins, Dolores! Six pins on every last one of those sheets! Don't you try to get away with just four, because I'm watching!”
“Yeah,” I says, “I know, and I bet you only wish it was forty degrees colder and a twenty-knot gale blowin.”
“What?” she caws down at me. “What did you say, Dolores Claiborne?”
“I said someone must be spreadin manure in their garden,” I says, “because I smell a lot more bullshit around here than usual.”
