I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

She told me I should keep reading—that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

As if promising her would finally put me in first place, even for a minute—for one fucking minute before she died. . . . All my life, I had come in second. Number two in a two-man race. Even now I was, with her gone four years and him locked away at Hatch. Number two in our never-ending two-man struggle.

It was only later that I realized how scared he must have been walking out of there—how terrifying all that sudden open space would be to someone who saw the enemy behind every tree, every steering wheel.

Part of me was scared to death about what the next weeks and months were going to entail. But another part of me was happy, in partial disbelief, still. He’s here, I remember thinking. He’s with me, Ma.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things.