the phone call about Himself’s death — "The Moms had Rusk shunt you…"
The Moms had Rusk shunt you to a top grief-pro so she wouldn’t have to feel guilty about practically sawing the hole in the microwave door herself. Among other little guilt and antiguilt operations. She always did believe Himself was doing more with Joelle than work. Poor old Himself never had eyes for anybody but the Moms.
Context
This is Orin's whole theory of his mother laid out in four sentences, and it's the Gertrude frame in miniature: a wife who suspected her husband of an affair he wasn't having, a survivor running "guilt and antiguilt operations" so continuous they've become how she metabolizes his death. The tell is that word "operations" — grief here isn't felt, it's administered, routed through a hired professional so that Avril never has to sit with her own hand in it. And Orin's needle at the end, "never had eyes for anybody but the Moms," flips the whole jealousy inside out: the man she policed for infidelity was the one person in the system who only ever looked at her. The mother reads as the family's unmourning center, the figure whose management of the loss is itself the evidence something is off.