Dolores Claiborne - Stephen King [110]
Yes, Greenbush said. It so happens that I knew from Ted Kenopensky what that argument was about. Donald had gotten his driver's licence that spring, and Mrs Donovan had gotten him a car for his birthday. The girl, Helga, said she wanted a car, too. Vera-Mrs Donovan-apparently tried to explain to the girl that the idea was silly, a car would be useless to her without a driver's licence and she couldn't get one of those until she was fifteen. Helga said that might be true in Maryland, but it wasn't the case in Maine-that she could get one there at fourteen which she was. Could that have been true, Miz Claiborne, or was it just an adolescent fantasy?
It was true back then, I says, although I think you have to be at least fifteen now. Mr Greenbush, the car she got her boy for his birthday was a Corvette?
Yes, he says, it was. How did you know that, Miz Claiborne?
I musta seen a pitcher of it sometime, I said, but I hardly heard my own voice. The voice I heard was Vera's. I'm tired of seeing them winch that Corvette out of the quarry in the moonlight, she told me as she lay dyin on the stairs. Tired of seem how the water ran out of the open window on the passenger side.
I'm surprised she kept a picture of it around, Greenbush said. Donald and Helga Donovan died in that car, you see. It happened in October of 1961, almost a year to the day after their father died. It seemed the girl was driving.
He went on talkin, but I hardly heard him, Andy-I was too busy fillin in the blanks for myself, and doin it so fast that I guess I musta known they were dead somewhere way down deep I musta known it all along. Greenbush said they'd been drinkin and pushin that Corvette along at better'n a hundred miles an hour when the girl missed a turn and went into the quarry; he said both of em were prob'ly dead long before that fancy two-seater sank to the bottom.
He said it was an accident, too, but maybe I knew a little more about accidents than he did.
Maybe Vera did, too, and maybe she'd always known that the argument they had that summer didn't have Jack Shit to do with whether or not Helga was gonna get a State of Maine driver's licence; that was just the handiest bone they had to pick. When McAuliffe ast me what Joe and I argued about before he got chokin me, I told him it was money on top n booze underneath. The tops of people's arguments are mostly quite a lot different from what's on the bottom, I've noticed, and it could be that what they were really arguin about that summer was what had happened to Michael Donovan the year before.
She and the hunky killed the man, Andy-she did everything but come out n tell me so. She never got caught, either, but sometimes there's people inside of families who've got pieces of the jigsaw puzzle the law never sees. People like Selena, for instance n maybe people like Donald n Helga Donovan, too. I wonder how they looked at her that summer, before they had that argument in The Harborside Restaurant n left Little Tall for the last time. I've tried n tried to remember how their eyes were when they looked at her, if they were like Selena's when she looked at me, n I just can't do it. P raps I will in time, but that ain't nothing I'm really lookin forward to, if you catch my meanin.
I do know that sixteen was young for a little hellion like Don Donovan to have a driver's licence-too damned young-and when you add in that hot car, why, you've got a recipe for disaster. Vera was smart enough to know that, and she must have been scared sick; she might have hated the father, but she loved the son like life itself. I know she did. She gave it to him just the same, though. Tough as she was, she put that rocket in his pocket, n Helga's, too, as it turned out, when he wasn't but a junior in high school n prob'ly just startin to shave. I think it was guilt, Andy. And maybe I want to think