Lillian’s Reviews > Small Things Like These > Status Update

Had it not been for her, his mother might very well have wound up in that place. In an earlier time, it could have been his own mother he was saving - if saving was what this could be called. And only God knew what would have happened to him, where he might have ended up.

He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kind-nesses, of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life.

As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

Always, Christmas brought out the best and the worst in people.

‘Is there anything I can do for you, a leanbh?’ he asked. 'All you need do is tell me?’
She looked at the window and took a breath and began to cry, the way those unused to any type of kindness do when it's at first or after a long time again encountered.

Not for the first time, Furlong felt that he was poor company for her, that he seldom made a long night shorter. Did she ever imagine how her life would be if she had married another?

Lately, he had begun to wonder what mattered, apart from Eileen and the girls. He was touching forty but didn't feel himself to be getting anywhere or making any kind of headway and could not but sometimes wonder what the days were for.

'But what if it was one of ours? Furlong said.
‘This is the very thing I'm saying, she said, rising again. ‘Tis not one of ours?'
‘Isn’t it a good job Mrs Wilson didn't share your ideas?’ Furlong looked at her. ‘Where would my mother have gone? Where would I be now?’

'Did Santy ever come to you, Daddy?' Sheila now asked, eerily.
They could be like young witches sometimes, his daughters, with their black hair and sharp eyes.
It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind

‘There’s no need to go if you don’t want, a Leanne,’ Furlong told her. ‘Stay here with me.’
But it cut him, all the same, to see one of his own so upset by the sight of what other children craved and he could not help but wonder if she’d be brave enough or able for what the world had in store.