Free Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

him.
    He said he loved me, and I believed that, too ... and after he’d said it n asked me if I felt the same for him, it only seemed polite to say I did.
    I was scared of what would happen to me if I didn’t—where I’d have to go, what I’d have to do, who’d look after my baby while I was doin it.
    All that’s gonna look pretty silly if you ever write it up, Nancy, but the silliest thing is I know a dozen women who were girls I went to school with who got married for those same reasons, and most of them are still married, and a good many of em are only holdin on, hopin to outlive the old man so they can bury him and then shake his beer-farts out of the sheets forever.
    By 1952 or so I’d pretty well forgotten his forehead, and by 1956 I didn’t have much use for the rest of him either, and I guess I’d started hatin him by the time Kennedy took over from Ike, but I never had a thought of killing him until later. I thought I’d stay with him because my kids needed a father, if for no other reason. Ain’t that a laugh? But it’s the truth. I swear it is. And I swear somethin else as well: if God gave me a second chance, I’d kill him again, even if it meant hellfire and damnation forever ... which it probably does.
    I guess everybody on Little Tall who ain’t a johnny-come-lately knows I killed him, and most of em prob‘ly think they know why—because of the way he had of usin his hands on me. But it wasn’t his hands on me that brought him to grief, and the simple truth is that, no matter what people on the island might have thought at the time, he never hit me a single lick during the last three years of our marriage. I cured him of that foolishness in late 1960 or early ’61.
    Up until then, he hit me quite a lot, yes. I can’t deny it. And I stood for it—I can’t deny that, either. The first time was the second night of the marriage. We’d gone down to Boston for the weekend—that was our honeymoon—and stayed at the Parker House. Hardly went out the whole time. We was just a couple of country mice, you know, and afraid we’d get lost. Joe said he was damned if he was gonna spend the twenty-five dollars my folks’d given us for mad-money on a taxi ride just because he couldn’t find his way back to the hotel. Gorry, wa’ant that man dumb! Of course I was, too ... but one thing Joe had that I didn’t (and I’m glad of it, too) was that everlastin suspicious nature of his. He had the idear the whole human race was out to do him dirty, Joe did, and I’ve thought plenty of times that when he did get drunk, maybe it was because it was the only way he could go to sleep without leavin one eye open.
    Well, that ain’t neither here nor there. What I set out to tell you was that we went down to the dinin room that Sat’dy night, had a good dinner, and then went back up to our room again. Joe was listin considerably to starboard on the walk down the hall, I remember—he’d had four or five beers with his dinner to go with the nine or ten he’d took on over the course of the afternoon. Once we were inside the room, he stood there lookin at me so long I asked him if he saw anythin green.
    “No,” he says, “but I seen a man down there in that restaurant lookin up your dress, Dolores. His eyes were just about hangin out on springs. And you knew he was lookin, didn’t you?”
    I almost told him Gary Cooper coulda been sittin in the corner with Rita Hayworth and I wouldn’t have known it, and then thought, Why bother? It didn’t do any good to argue with Joe when he’d been drinkin; I didn’t go into that marriage with my eyes entirely shut, and I’m not gonna try to kid you that I did.
    “If there was a man lookin up my dress, why didn’t you go over and tell him to shut his eyes, Joe?” I asked. It was only a joke—maybe I was tryin to turn him aside, I really don’t remember—but he didn’t take it as a joke. That I do remember. Joe wasn’t a man to take a joke; in fact, I’d