My mother called and said she'd found photographs

My mother called and said she'd found photographs.

She was laughing, the way she does before

she tells you something hard.

Then she said: I always knew you lied about the glass thing before,

forty years ago. So gently I almost

couldn't hear it.

I was seven, small enough to fit

my whole mistake in the space

between truth and the dog.

The dog never broke anything. I broke it—that thing with the heft,

the way it felt in my child-hands, impossible

and important to fix.

My mother was never angry.

She just let me keep the lie, let me

believe the dog was guilty, let me grow up thinking

I'd gotten away with something, when really

she was giving me a gift wrapped in her silence,

held for forty years.

Now she tells me gently

that she always knew. Now she sets it down

like a present I don't deserve.

I still want to blame the dog.

I still want to believe I deserved to get away with it.