Dolores Claiborne - Stephen King [33]
I started thinkin about goin into her room and lookin through her closet and bureau drawers, but then I got disgusted with myself. I may be a lot of things, Andy, but I hope I ain't never been a sneak. Still, even havin the idear made me see that I'd spent way too much time just creepin around the edges of whatever was goin on, hopin the problem would solve itself or that Selena would come to me on her own.
There came a day-not long before Halloween, because Little Pete'd put up a paper witch in the entry window, I remember-when I was supposed to go down to the Strayhorn place after lunch. Me and Lisa McCandless were going to turn those fancy Persian rugs downstairs-you're supposed to do that every six months so they won't fade, or so they'll fade even, or some damned thing. I put my coat on and got it buttoned and was halfway to the door when I thought, What are you doin with this heavy fall coat on, you foolish thing? It's sixty-five degrees out there, at least, real Indian Summer weather. And this other voice come back and said, It won't be sixty-five out on the reach; it'll be more like fifty out there. Damp, too And that's how I come to know I wasn't goin anywhere near the Strayhorn place that afternoon. I was gonna take the ferry across to Jonesport instead, and have it out with my daughter. I called Lisa, told her we'd have to do the rugs another day, and left for the ferry landin. I was just in time to catch the two-fifteen. If I'd missed it, I might've missed her, and who knows how different things might have turned out then?
I was the first one off the ferry-they was still slippin the last moorin rope over the last post when I stepped down onto the dock-and I went straight to the high school. I got the idear on my way up that I wasn't going to find her in the study-hall no matter what she and her home-room teacher said, that she'd be out behind the woodshop after all, with the rest of the thuds all of em laughin and grab-assin around and maybe passin. a bottle of cheap wine in a paper bag. If you ain't never been in a situation like that, you don't know what it's like and I can't describe it to you. All I can say is that I was findin out that there's no way you can prepare yourself for a broken heart. You just have to keep marchin forward and hope like hell it doesn't happen.
But when I opened the study-hall door and peeked in, she was there, sittin at a desk by the windows with her head bent over her algebra book. She didn't see me at first n I just stood there, lookin at her. She hadn't fallen in with bad comp'ny like I'd feared, but my heart broke a little just the same, Andy, because it looked like she'd fallen in with no comp'ny at all, and could be that's even worse. Maybe her home-room teacher didn't see anything wrong with a girl studyin all by herself after school in that great big room; maybe she even thought it was admirable. I didn't see nothing admirable about it, though, nor anything healthy, either. She didn't even have the detention kids to keep her comp'ny, because they keep the bad actors in the lib'ry at Jonesport-Beals High.
She should have been with her girlfriends, maybe listenin to records or moonin over some boy, and instead she was sittin there in a dusty ray of after-noon sun, sittin in the smell