I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb Read Free Book Online

Slumped over, his head on the table. These pages were all over the place: stuck in the hedges, stuck against the chicken coop.
    They’d blown all over the yard.
    “And so I ran back down inside and called the police. And the priest. Your grandfather wasn’t a churchgoer—he had a kind of a grudge against St. Mary’s for some reason—but I figured, well, I’d call the priest anyway. . . . It was awful, Dominick. I was so scared. I was shaking like a leaf. And here I was, carrying your brother and you. . . .”
    I reached over. Put my arm around her.
    “After I made those two phone calls, I just went back out there and waited. Went back up the stairs. I stood there, about ten or twelve feet away from him, watching him. I knew he was dead, but I kept watching him, hoping maybe I’d see him blink or yawn. Hoping and praying that I was mistaken. But I knew I wasn’t. He hadn’t moved a muscle.”
    She passed her hand again over Papa’s manuscript. “And so I went around the yard, picking up this thing. It was all I could think of to do for him, Dominick. Pick up the pages of his history.”

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    The room filled up with silence. The sun had shifted—had cast us both in shadow.
    “Well, anyway,” she said. “That was a long time ago.”
    Before I left, I tapped the wainscoting back into place, covering once again Domenico’s notes and calculations. I walked out the door and down the front porch steps, balancing my toolbox, the strongbox, and several foil-wrapped packages of frozen leftovers. (“I worry about you in that apartment all by yourself, honey. Your face looks too thin. I can tell you’re not eating the way you should. Here, take these.”) At the door of the truck, I heard her calling and went back up the steps.
    “You forgot this,” she said. I put my hand out, palm up, and she opened her fist. The strongbox key fell into my hand. “ La chiave, ”
    she said.
    “Come again?”
    “ La chiave. Your key. The word for it just came back to me.”
    “ La chiave, ” I repeated, and dropped the key into my pocket.
    That night, I awoke from a sound sleep with the idea: the perfect gift for my dying mother. It was so simple and right that its obviousness had eluded me until 2:00 A.M. I’d have her father’s life story translated, printed, and bound for her to read.
    I drove up to the university and found the Department of Romance Languages office tucked into the top floor of a stone building dwarfed by two massive, leafless beech trees. The secretary drew up a list of possibilities for me to try. After an hour’s worth of false leads and locked doors, I walked the narrow steps to a half-landing and knocked at the office door of Nedra Frank, the last person on my list.
    She looked about forty, but it’s hard to tell with those hair-yanked-back, glasses-on-a-chain types. As she leafed through my grandfather’s pages, I checked out her breasts (nice ones), the mole on her neck, her gnawed-down cuticles. She shared the office with another grad student; her sloppy desk and his neat one were a study in opposites.
    “Some of this is written in standard Italian,” she said. “And some I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 31
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    of it’s . . . it looks like peasant Sicilian. What was he—schizo or something?”
    Okay, bitch, thanks anyway. Give it the fuck back to me and I’ll be on my way.
    “I’m a scholar,” she said, looking up. She handed me back the manuscript. “What you’re asking me to do is roughly the same as trying to commission a serious artist to paint you something that goes with the sofa and drapes.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Okay.” Already, I’d begun backing out of her low-ceilinged office—a glorified closet, really, and not all that glorified.
    She sighed. “Let me see it again.” I handed it back and she scanned several pages, frowning. “The typed pages are single-spaced,” she