“You must have had more sins than I thought,” she said, laughing. “Didn’t he give that crowd the surprise of their lives! Some of them must have been kneeling there an hour or more.”

After that, whenever I went to confession, I got the same penance — three Hail Marys — and my mother always asked me what the priest had given me, and when she heard, she would laugh again, thinking of the angry faces of the women the first time. Sometimes she told other people about it, and I always liked to hear the story. Although everyone knew about it, I still felt it to be a private joke between the two of us, and I loved that. Then one day, sometime in my ninth year, I spoiled it all. I saw the little joke die, and I knew that I had killed it.

It happened in a very simple way. My younger sister, Deirdre, had a toy sewing machine that she loved. She was seven then. The machine actually made stitches, and she used to work with it for hours, turning the little handwheel that made it go. I had no interest in sewing and never touched the machine, but it was her favorite toy.

One day, I wandered into the front sitting room, where I found my mother in her usual chair, with a pile of mending on a table at her side. She was busy with a sock. I hurled myself across the room and into her lap. Under this onslaught, she pricked her finger with the needle, gave a cry of irritation, and pushed me away. I tumbled deliberately down on the floor and sat there, glaring at her in outrage.

“What’s the matter with you?” she cried, putting her punctured finger in her mouth.

“I wanted to sit on your lap.”

“Well, you can’t. You’re too big, for one thing.”

“Derry sits on your lap,” I said.

“Derry only weighs about a half a pound.”

That was true.

“And,” continued my mother, “you must weigh almost as much as I do myself.”

It was all too true. I rushed upstairs in a fury, and into the room I shared with Derry. There was the little sewing machine, sitting on the window ledge, where she had left it. I took it up and gazed at it in hatred. Then I tugged the little wheel off. After that, I wrestled with the machine until it was ruined. When it was all broken, I regarded it, first with satisfaction and then, very quickly, with dismay and regret. I was very sorry I had broken Derry’s toy, and I was afraid of what would happen to me. I did the only thing I could think of. I leaned out of the window and dropped all the pieces down onto the cement path outside our kitchen door. Then I went thundering back down the stairs again.