JOI’s father’s garage monologue (pp. 166–167)

The unmentioned marital secret, a generation early. Mid-confession about his drinking, the grandfather lets slip that he once kept a second, smaller flask in the Montclair's glove compartment, and that "your devoted mother did something to it" — emptied it, tampered with it, some covert wifely intervention against his dipsomania — and then: "The subject has never been mentioned between us." A thing done, known by both, and sealed forever in silence. This is the family's secrets-as-camouflage habit at its root: a marriage that runs on the deliberate non-mention of what each spouse knows the other did, the buried subject that both carry and neither raises. Two generations before Avril's household of displayed eccentricity hiding real secrets, the same machinery is already turning — a couple whose intimacy includes an agreed-upon blank space where the truth about the drinking should be.