Hal, Mario, and the Moms’s sadness — "You can also just raise the…"

Hal's defense of his mother's grief, and one of the book's tenderest figures for the family's hiddenness. Mario can't square the Moms's dry eyes with real mourning, so Hal reaches for the half-mast flag lowered when Himself died: there are two ways to fly a flag at half-mast, he says — you can lower the flag, or "you can also just raise the pole… to like twice its original height." The grief you can't see may not be absent but structural, the whole scale of the person silently doubled so that half-mast reads as normal height. "She's plenty sad, I bet," he finishes — a bet, not a knowledge, the loyal son insisting on an interior life in his mother that no one, including him, can actually verify. It is the family's defining move made gentle: the argument that the absence of visible feeling is itself the evidence of feeling too large to show.