Author's Purpose · ACT Reading

ACT Reading Quiz

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CRAFT & STRUCTURE

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PASSAGE

1 The traveler had knocked twice before anyone answered, and 2 when the door finally opened, an old man in 3 a leather apron stood blinking against the porch light. 4 "You're the one with the broken trunk," he said, 5 not as a question but as a fact he had 6 already settled in his mind before she spoke a 7 word. Mara nodded, too tired to explain how her 8 car had stalled three miles back or how she 9 had walked the rest of the way carrying a 10 suitcase whose latch had snapped somewhere between the highway 11 and this unfamiliar town. 12 Mr. Okafor did not ask why a woman traveled 13 alone at midnight with a broken suitcase, and he 14 did not comment on the mud caking her shoes. 15 He simply set the case on his workbench, switched 16 on a lamp shaped like a lantern, and began 17 sorting through drawers of pins and springs with the 18 unhurried patience of someone who had spent forty years 19 coaxing stubborn mechanisms back into cooperation. Mara watched his 20 hands, thick-knuckled and scarred, move with a precision that 21 seemed almost tender, as though the latch were something 22 wounded rather than simply broken. 23 "People bring me their locks when everything else has 24 failed," he told her, without looking up from the 25 small brass mechanism now spread across a square of 26 velvet. "A jammed door, a stuck safe, a suitcase 27 that won't open on the one night you actually 28 need what's inside it. They come in frightened, and 29 they leave still frightened, usually, because I can't fix 30 the reason they needed the lock opened in the 31 first place. I can only fix the lock." Mara 32 said nothing, but she thought of the letter folded 33 inside that suitcase, the one she had been carrying 34 for six hundred miles without reading past its first 35 line. 36 When the latch finally gave way with a soft 37 click, Mr. Okafor did not open the lid himself. 38 He turned the suitcase toward her and stepped back, 39 the way a doctor might step back after setting 40 a bone, leaving the rest of the healing to 41 the patient. "That's yours to open," he said, "not 42 mine." Mara's fingers hovered over the latch for a 43 long moment before she lifted it, and the old 44 locksmith busied himself sweeping metal shavings from his workbench, 45 giving her the privacy of a stranger who understood that 46 some doors, once opened, cannot be closed again. 47 She never told him what was inside, and he 48 never asked. But years later, whenever a lock stuck 49 or a stubborn door refused to yield, she thought 50 of his velvet cloth, his patient hands, and the 51 quiet dignity of a man who mended what he 52 could and left what he couldn't to the person 53 who owned it.

The author most likely includes Mr. Okafor's comment that he can only "fix the lock" (lines 29-31) primarily to:

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