Excerpt from I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"What?" I said. "What are you thinking about?"

"Oh, nothing, really. I was just remembering the day he died. He was all alone out there, all by himself when he had that stroke." She drew her Kleenex from her sleeve. Wiped her eyes. "That same morning, while he was eating his breakfast, he told me he was almost done with it. It took me back a little--him giving me a progress report like that--because up until then, he had never said one word to me about it. Not directly, I mean. . . . And so I asked him, I said, 'What are you going to do with it, Papa, once you're finished?' I thought he was going to start writing away to some publishers back in Italy. Try to get it made into a book like he'd said. But you know what he told me? He said maybe he'd just throw it into the ash barrel and put a match to it. Burn the whole thing up once he was finished writing it. It just wasn't the answer I was expecting. After all that trouble he'd gone to to get it down. . . . I heard him sobbing up there a couple of times that last morning--really wailing one time. It was t eee errible. And I wanted to go up to him, Dominick, but I thought it would have made him mad if I did. Made things worse. He'd been so private about it.

"And then, later on, when I went out there with his lunch, there he was. 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."

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.

© June 1998 , Wally Lamb. Used by permission.