phillippe

His name is Phillippe and he hawks newspapers at the red light just before the underpass outside a town called Pharr in southernmost Texas. He has two children – Jose Carlos and Angelica – and a common-law wife, Rose, with whom he’s lived for seven years, now. After he’s done, this morning, he will head home and count his money. The total will be sixteen fifty-six. He will use that to feed the children for the next three days. He’s learned how to make money last. He’s had no choice. In another year, Jose Carlos will join a local gang, even though he’s only 10. He’ll think it’s a way to become stronger, but it will only kill him, in the end. Angelica will be a serious student. Someday, she will graduate Princeton. No one will be there to see her in cap and gown and she will spend the afternoon alternately alone and with her roommates parents who have a summer home in the Hamptons. Phillippe knows none of this, of course, this morning, in the 98-degree heat, as he walks betweens cars, raising high the papers, the San Antonio Express. No one knows any of this. How could they? It is unknowable. As is the unlikely possibility that Angelica will someday become the Surgeon General of the United States, which she will.