Octavio Solis > Recent Status Updates

There was a Wednesday, or it became a Wednesday as he washed and dressed and buffed his shoes, and walked out into a world oddly untransformed. Miracles leave no trace.

Those handkerchiefs, white, identical except for the tiny mending his mother made in them where the fabric might wear through. No telling which one had wiped sweat off the face of the woman dying in labor, which one had blotted an orphan’s tears. When his father took a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe milk from Jack’s chin, it felt like an induction into intolerable mysteries. He did not let himself inhale.

She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely. He puts on one suit of clothes, a fraud is what he is. He puts on another suit of clothes — a bum, a grifter. P. 118

Again, caught in Robinson’s prose like a fly on a web.

Loved the French Lesson. Really clever.