Orin's Phoenix morning (pp. 48–49)
Orin also shaves in the shower, face red with heat, wreathed in steam, by feel, shaving upward, with south-to-north strokes, as he was taught.
Context
The scene's last line, and the gesture outlives whoever gave it. Orin shaves blind and against the grain, "south-to-north," "as he was taught" — a taught motion still running in the body of a grown man who spends the whole chapter in dread. The raw doesn't name the teacher, but placed at the close of a scene that has just walked Orin back into his father's desert, the taught gesture reads as one more thing handed down and still executing on schedule. (Who taught the stroke is left unstated in the raw — the father-attribution is the plan's reading and mine, flagged inferred.)