I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb

two of us stood there, shouting at each other. Having a pity contest. You think Dessa would have ever pulled that shit? You think Joy would have ever gotten her ass over to the hospital and visited him like Dess had done?
    Ray got out of the truck and walked toward the house. I backed down the driveway. Braked. “Hey?” I called. “You okay?” He stopped in his tracks. Nodded. “Don’t talk to any of those reporters or TV jerks if they call. Or if they come over here. Just tell ’em, ‘No comment.’ ”
    Ray spat on the grass. “Any of those clowns come around here, I’ll take a baseball bat to them.” He probably would, too. Fuckin’
    Ray.
    I backed onto the road and threw her into first. “Hey!” he called.
    He was walking toward the truck. I rolled down the window and braced myself.
    “Just answer me one thing,” he said. “Why didn’t you let them at least try to put his hand back on? Now he’s got a physical disability on top of a mental one. How come you didn’t have them at least try ?”
    I’d been flogging myself with the same question for the past two I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 65
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    days. But it pissed me off— him asking it. A little late for fatherly concern, wasn’t it?
    “For one thing, they were only giving the reattachment a fifty-fifty chance,” I said. “If it didn’t work, it would have just sat there, dead, sewn to his wrist. And for another thing . . . for another thing. . . . You didn’t hear him, Ray. It was the first time in twenty years he was in charge of something. And so I couldn’t. . . . I mean, okay, you’re right—it doesn’t make him a hero.” I looked up from the steering wheel.
    Looked him in the eye—that trick I’d taught myself way back when.
    “It was his hand, Ray. . . . It was his choice.”
    He stood there, hands in his pockets. Half a minute or more went by.
    “You know what the funny thing is?” he said. “I never even bought that goddamned knife. I won it in a card game from this guy in my outfit. Big, beefy Swede, came from Minnesota. I can see him plain as the nose on your face, but I been trying all afternoon to think what that guy’s name was. Isn’t that something? My kid cuts his hand off with that knife, and I can’t even remember the guy’s name I won the damn thing from.”
    “My kid.” It struck me that he said that. Claimed Thomas.
    That night, Joy brought home Chinese food as an apology. I sat there, eating without really tasting it. “How is it?” she asked me.
    “It’s great,” I said. “Great.”
    Later, in bed, she rolled over to my side and started getting friendly. “Dominick?” she said. “I’m sorry about this morning. I just want things to get back to normal.” She rubbed her leg against my leg, flicked her finger in and out of the waistband on my underpants. Got me interested with her hands. I just lay there, letting her do me without doing anything back.
    She got on top and put me inside of her. Put my hand, my fingers, where she wanted them. I was just going through the motions at first—performing a service. Then I started thinking about Dessa out there in the hospital parking lot, in her jeans and little jacket. I was making love to Dessa . . .

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    WALLY LAMB
    Joy came quickly—intensely. Her orgasm felt like a relief, a burden lifted off my shoulders. I was almost there myself, almost ready, when I just stopped. I didn’t mean to. I just started thinking of things: the way the state hospital corridors smell like dead farts and cigarettes, and the way Dan the Man had painted that happily-ever-after mailbox out there for them, and the picture I’d conjured up for Ray to get myself off the hook: Thomas’s severed hand, stitched to his wrist like dead gray meat.
    I went soft on her. Slipped out. Nudged her off me and rolled away.
    “Hey, you?” she said. Her hand curled around my shoulder.
    “Hey me what?”
    She