Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King Read Free Book Online Page B

any more than Vera did.
    It was the sound of the vacuum, you see. That was what I realized when I woke up that mornin. I told you there was nothin wrong with her ears, and it was the sound of the vacuum that told her if I was really doin the parlor or standin at the foot of the stairs, on my mark. When a vacuum cleaner is sittin in one spot, it only makes one sound, you see. Just zooooooo, like that. But when you’re vacuumin a rug, it makes two sounds, and they go up and down in waves. WHOOP, that’s when you push it out. And zoop, that’s when you pull it back to you for another stroke. WHOOP-zoop , WHOOP-zoop , WHOOP-zoop.
    Quit scratchin your head, you two, and look at the smile Nancy’s wearin. All a body’d have to do to know which of you has spent some time runnin a vacuum cleaner is look at your faces. If you really feel like it’s that important, Andy, try it for yourself. You’ll hear it right off, though I imagine Maria’ d just about drop dead if she came in and saw you vacuumin the livin-room rug.
    What I realized that mornin was that she’d stopped just listenin for when the vacuum cleaner started runnin, because she’d realized that wasn’t good enough anymore. She was listenin to see if the sound went up and down like it does when a vacuum’s actually workin. She wouldn’t pull her dirty little trick until she heard that WHOOP-zoop wave.
    I was crazy to try out my new idear, but I couldn’t right away, because she went into one of her bad times right about then, and for quite awhile she just did her business in the bedpan or peed a little in her diapers if she had to. And I started to get scared that this would be the time she wouldn’t come back out of it. I know that sounds funny, since she was so much easier to mind when she was confused in her thinkin, but when a person gets a good idear like that, they kinda want to take it for a test-drive. And you know, I felt somethin for that bitch besides wanting to throttle her. After knowin her over forty years, it’d be goddam strange if I didn’t. She knitted me an afghan once, you know—this was long before she got really bad, but it’s still on my bed, and it’s some warm on those February nights when the wind plays up nasty.
    Then, about a month or a month and a half after I woke up with my idear, she started to come around again. She’d watch Jeopardy on the little bedroom TV and rag the contestants if they didn’t know who was President durin the Spanish-American War or who played Melanie in Gone With the Wind. She started all her old globber about how her kids might come n visit her before Labor Day. And, accourse, she pestered to be put in her chair so she could watch me hang the sheets and make sure I used six pins and not just four.
    Then there come a Thursday when I pulled the bedpan out from under her at noon dry as a bone and empty as a car salesman’s promises. I can’t tell you how pleased I was to see that empty bedpan. Here we go, you sly old fox, I thought. Now ain’t we gonna see. I went downstairs and called Susy Proulx into the parlor.
    “I want you to vacuum in here today, Susy,” I told her.
    “Okay, Missus Claiborne,” she said. That’s what both of them called me, Andy—what most people on the island call me, s’far’s that goes. I never made an issue of it at church or anywhere else, but that’s how it is. It’s like they think I was married to a fella named Claiborne at some point in my checkered past ... or maybe I just want to believe most of em don’t remember Joe, although I guess there’s plenty who do. It don’t matter too much, one way or the other, in the end; I guess I am entitled to believe what I want to believe. I was the one married to the bastard, after all.
    “I don’t mind,” she goes on, “but why are you whisperin?”
    “Never mind,” I said, “just keep your own voice down. And don’t you break anything in here, Susan Emma Proulx—don’t you dare. ”
    Well, she blushed