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

"Saint who?" I said, immediately sorry I'd asked.

"Saint Agatha," he repeated. "The patron saint invoked against fire and volcanoes and cancer." He rambled on and on about his stupid saint: a virgin whose jilted suitor had had her breasts severed, her body burned at the stake. Agatha had stopped the eruption of a volcano, had died a Bride of Christ, blah blah blah.

One morning at 6:00 a.m., Thomas woke me up with the theory that the Special K our mother ate for breakfast every day had been deliberately impregnated with carcinogens. The Kellogg's Cereal Company was secretly owned by the Soviets, he said. "They target the relatives of the people they're really after. I'm on their hit list because I do God's bidding." Now that he was on to them, he said, he was considering exposing Kellogg's--rubbing it right in their corporate face. He would probably end up as Time magazine's Man of the Year and have to go into hiding. Stalkers followed famous people. Look what had happened to poor John Lennon. Did I remember the song "Instant Karma"? John had written it specifically for him, to encourage him to do good in the world after he'd gone. "Listen!" my brother said. "It's so obvious, it's pathetic!" He broke out into a combination of song and shouting.

Instant karma's gonna get you--gonna look you right in the FACE

You better recognize your BROTHER and join the HUMAN RACE!



One Sunday afternoon when Thomas and I drove down to visit Ma, her bed was empty. We found her in the solarium, illuminated by a column of sun coming through the skylight, sitting by herself among clusters of other people's visitors. By then, the chemo had stained her skin and turned her hair to duck fluff--had given her, once again, the singed look she'd had that day she emerged from the burning parlor on Hollyhock Avenue. Somehow, bald and shrunken in her quilted pink robe, she looked beautiful to me.

Thomas sat slumped and uncommunicative through that whole visit. He had wanted me to stop at McDonald's on the way down and I'd told him no--that maybe we could go there on the ride back. In the solarium, he pouted and stared trancelike at the TV and ignored Ma's questions and efforts at conversation. He refused to take off his coat. He wouldn't stop checking his watch.

I was angry by the time we left, angrier still when, during the drive home, he interrupted my speech about his selfishness to ask if we were still going to McDonald's. "Don't you get it, asshole?" I shouted. "Don't you even come up for air when your own goddamned mother's dying?" He undid his seatbelt and climbed over the front seat. Squatting on the backseat floor, he assumed a modified version of the old duck-and-cover.

I pulled the car into the breakdown lane, threw her into neutral, and told him to get the fuck back in front--that I was sick and tired of his bullshit, fed up with his crap on top of everything else I was trying to juggle. When he refused to get up, I yanked him up and out of the car. He pulled free and bolted, running across the interstate without even looking. Horns wailed, cars swerved wildly. Don't ask me how he made it across. And by the time I got across the highway myself, Thomas had disappeared. I ran, panic-stricken, through woods and yards, imagining the ugly thump of impact, Thomas ripped in half, his blood splattered all over the road.

I found him lying in the tall grass at the side of the highway about a quarter of a mile up from where the car was. His eyes were closed, his mouth smiling up at the sun. When I helped him up, the grass was dented in the shape of his body. Like a visual aid at a crime scene. Like one of those angels he and I used to make in new snow. . . . Back in the car, I gripped the wheel to steady my hands and tried not to hear and see those cars that had swerved out of his way. In Madison, I pulled into a McDonald's and got him a large fries, a Quarter Pounder with cheese, a strawberry shake. If he was not exactly happy for the rest of the trip, he was at least quiet and full.

© June 1998 , Wally Lamb. Used by permission.