Megan Quinn’s Reviews > Small Things Like These > Status Update

"The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been - which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life."

"He thought of Mrs Wilson, of her daily kindnesses, 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."

"Furlong smoothed things over as best he could and carried on along with the excitement in his heart matched by the fear of what he could not yet see but knew he would encounter."

"Furlong carried on uneasily, thinking back over the Dublin girl who'd asked him to take her here so she could drown, and how he had refused her; of how he had afterwards lost his way along the back roads, and of the queer old man out slashing the thistles in the fog that evening with the puckaun, and what he'd said about how the road would take him wherever he wanted to go."

"And if this was the truth, hadn't it been an act of daily grace, on Ned's part, to make Furlong believe that he had come from finer stock, while watching steadfastly over him, through the years. This was the man who had polished his shoes and tied the laces, who'd bought him his first razor and taught him ow to shave. Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?"

But as soon as the thought came to him, he knew the thought itself was privileged and wondered why he hadn't given the sweets and other things he'd been gifted at some of the houses to the less well-off he had met in others. Always, Christmas brought out the best and worst in people."

"People could be good, Furlong reminded himself, as he drove back to town; it was a matter of learning how to manage and balance the give-and-take in a way that let you get on with the others as well as your own.

and how he had taken the money and left her there at the table with nothing before her and the breast milk leaking under the little cardigan and staining her blouse, and how he'd gone on, like a hypocrite, to Mass."

"What most tormented him was not so much how she'd been left in the coal shed or the stance of the Mother Superior; the worst was how the girl had been handled while he was present and how he'd allowed that and had not asked about her baby - the one thing she asked him to do -

"'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?'

'Weren't Mrs Wilson's cares far from any of ours?' Eileen said. 'Sitting out in that big house with her pension and a farm of land and your mother and Ned working under her. Was she not one of the few women on earth who could do as she pleased?'"