Orin and Hal on the phone (p. 1014)

Avril's buried Québecois self surfaces as a facial tic. The historical record of French Canada's defeat on the Plains of Abraham lives in her body: "mention 1759 and the Moms's lips disappear," so reliably that Pemulis and Axford chalk a "big gothic 1759" on the blackboard before her grammar class "just to watch the Moms's lips disappear when she comes in." The queen's origin — the L'Islet potato farm now swallowed by the Concavity, the home town wiped off the map — is a suppressed nationalism she can't fully control, readable to teenagers who've learned to trip the reflex for sport. The family's most composed operator has one seam, and it is the lost homeland.