Mario’s birth and defects
Luckily Avril’s half-brother Charles Tavis was upstairs, using the portable StairMaster he’d brought with him for an extended and emotional-battery-recharging visit the preceding spring, after the horrible snafu with the video-scoreboard at Toronto’s Skydome; and he heard the commotion and scuttled out and down and promptly took charge.
Context
C.T. is upstairs on his StairMaster at the moment of Mario's birth, and the timeline is doing quiet, deliberate work: the visit began "the preceding spring," and Mario comes in November two months premature, out of a seven-month pregnancy — the arithmetic the book is content to let the reader run. What it hands you plainly is the tableau: while the father is downstairs "ragged from an afternoon of Wild Turkey," it's the wife's half-brother who scuttles down and "promptly took charge" of the emergency, the birth, the family. The uncle installed in the house, taking charge, years before there's any throne to usurp — the scene plants the paternity question and the succession in one image, and does it at the newest son's first breath.