the alcoholic father's death, toasted with the first shot — "Matty still toasted the man’s final…"

The disease passing straight down the line: the father dies of cirrhosis and acute pancreatitis — not the composed slump one imagines but choking on a fountain of aspirated blood — and the son, himself a drinker, memorializes the man with the first shot of every indulgence. The inheritance is literal and ceremonial at once, the drink that killed the father raised in his honor by the son it is presumably killing next, the toast making the transmission a rite.