I Know This Much Is True Read Online Free PDF Page B

bedroom. I was lifting weights, shirt off, glasses on.
    “So what am I supposed to do about it?” I said. “Hold a snot rag to her nose?”
    “Just try being decent to her,” he said. “She’s your mother, Dominick. Sometimes you treat her like s-h-i-t.”
    I stared at myself in our bedroom mirror as I lifted the weights, studying the muscle definition I’d begun to acquire and which I could now see clearly, thanks to my glasses. “Why don’t you say the word instead of spelling it,” I smirked. “Go ahead. Say ‘shit.’ Give yourself a thrill.”
    He’d been changing out of his school clothes as we spoke. Now he stood there, hands on his hips, wearing just his underpants, his socks, and one of those fake-turtleneck dickey things that were popular with all the goody-goody kids at our school. Thomas had them in four or five different colors. God, I hated those dickeys of his.
    I looked at the two of us, side by side, in the mirror. Next to me, Thomas was a scrawny joke. Mr. Pep Squad Captain. Mr. Goody-Goody Boy.
    “I mean it, Dominick,” he said. “You better treat her right or I’ll say something to Ray. I will . Don’t think I wouldn’t.”
    Which was bullshit and we both knew it.
    I grabbed my barbell wrench, banged extra weights onto the bar, I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 23
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    lifted them. Fink. Pansy Ass Dickey Boy. “Oh, geez, I’m nervous,” I told him. “I’m so scared, I’ll probably shit my p-a-n-t-s.”
    He stood there, just like Ma, his look of indignation melting into forgiveness. “Just cool it, is all I’m saying, Dominick,” he said. “Oh, by the way, I like your glasses.”
    When Ma came back down the stairs on that day of failed kitchen renovation, she was carrying a gray metal strongbox. I put down the picture album, stood, and walked toward her. “Here, honey,” she said. “This is for you. Phew, kind of heavy.”
    “Ma, I told you I’d get it.” I took it from her. “What’s in it, anyways?”
    “Open it and see,” she said.
    She had masking-taped the key to the side of the box; I kidded her about it—told her it was a good thing she didn’t work for Fort Knox. She watched my fingers peel the key free, put it in the lock, and turn. In anticipation of my opening the strongbox, she didn’t even seem to hear my teasing.
    Inside the box was a large manila envelope curled around a small coverless dictionary and held in place with an elastic band that broke as soon as I touched it. The envelope held a thick sheaf of paper—a manuscript of some kind. The first ten or fifteen pages were typewritten—originals and carbon copies. The rest had been written in long-hand—a scrawling, ornate script in blue fountain-pen ink. “It’s Italian, right?” I asked. “What is it?”
    “It’s my father’s life story,” she said. “He dictated it the summer he died.”
    As I fanned through the thing, its mildewy aroma went up my nose. “Dictated it to who?” I asked her. “You?”
    “Oh, gosh, no,” she said. Did I remember the Mastronunzios from church? Tootsie and Ida Mastronunzio? My mother was always doing that: assuming that my mental database of all the Italians in Three Rivers was as extensive as hers was.
    “Uh-uh,” I said.
    Sure I did, she insisted. They drove that big white car to Mass? Ida I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 24
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    WALLY LAMB
    worked at the dry cleaner’s? Walked with a little bit of a limp? Well, anyway, Tootsie had a cousin who came over from Italy right after the war. Angelo Nardi, his name was. He’d been a courtroom stenographer in Palermo. “He was a handsome fella, too—very dashing. He was looking for work.”
    Her father had been saying for years how, someday, he was going to sit down and tell the story of his life for the benefit of siciliani . He thought boys and young men back in the Old Country would want to read about how one of their own had come to America and made good. Gotten