I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb Page A

it’s finished?”
    “What?” Her eyes followed mine to the briefcase. “Oh, no, ” she said. “This is my doctoral thesis. The apartment house where I live was broken into last week, so I’m carrying this wherever I go. But I’m working on your project. It’s coming along.” She asked me nothing about my mother’s condition.
    “How did you know where I live?” I asked.
    “Why? Is it a deep, dark secret or something?”
    “No, I just—”
    “From your check. I copied your address down before I cashed it.
    In case I had to get ahold of you. Then I was just out for a drive—
    I’ve been so stressed out lately—and I just happened to pass by your street sign and I remembered it. Hillyndale Drive. It’s such an unusual spelling. Was someone trying to be quaint or something?
    Faux British?”
    I shrugged, jingled the change in my pockets. “Couldn’t tell you,”
    I said.
    “I’d been meaning to call you anyway. About the manuscript.
    Your grandfather used a lot of proverbs—country sayings—and they don’t lend themselves to translation. I thought I’d just leave them as is and then paraphrase them in the endnotes. If that’s okay. I mean, it’s your money.”
    Hadn’t we already had this conversation once? She was just out for a drive, my ass. “That would be fine,” I said.
    I offered her a beer; she accepted.
    “So why are you stressed out?” I said.
    For one thing, she said, the two undergraduate classes they made her teach were certifiably “brain-dead.” They didn’t want to learn anything; they just wanted A’s. And for another thing, her department chair was threatened by her knowledge of Dante, which was superior to his. And for a third thing, her office mate had disgusting personal habits. He flossed his teeth right there at his desk.
    Manicured his fingernails with a nail clipper that sent everything flying over to her side. Just that day she had found two fingernails I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 38
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    WALLY LAMB
    on her desk blotter, after she had told him. . . . She was sick to death of academic men, she said—sucking, forever, on the breast of the university so that they wouldn’t have to get on with real life. “What do you do for a living?”
    “I paint houses,” I said.
    “A housepainter !” she groaned, flopping down on my couch.
    “ Perfect! ”
    She finished her beer, said yes to another. When I came back in with it, she was over at my bookcase, cocking her head diagonally to read the spines. “Garcia Marquez, Styron, Solzhenitsyn,” she said. “I must say, Mr. Housepainter, I’m impressed.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “You’d think a dumb fuck like me would be reading—what?—Mickey Spillane? Hustler? ”
    “Or this,” she said. She took my boxed James M. Cain trilogy from the shelf, waving it like a damning piece of evidence. She walked over to the picture window. “Is this snow supposed to amount to anything? I never follow the forecast.”
    “It wasn’t forecast,” I said. “Let’s see what they’re saying.” I clicked on the little weather radio I keep in the bookcase. The staticky announcer said three to five inches. Oh, great, I thought. Snowed in with this supercilious bitch. Just what I needed.
    Nedra picked up the weather radio, looked at it front and back, clicked it on and off. “So you’re a real fan of weather?” she said.
    “I’m not a fan of it,” I said. “But you need to know what it’s going to be doing out there when you’re in the painting business. In season. You have to stay on top of it.”
    “You have to stay on top,” she repeated. “God, you men are all alike.” She laughed—a fingernails-down-the-blackboard kind of shriek—asked me if I wanted a beer. If I was planning to feed her or just get her drunk and then push her back out in the snow.
    I told her I didn’t have much of anything, unless she liked chicken broth or Honey Nut Cheerios.
    “We could order a pizza,” she said.
    “All