Hal supine, the blizzard, Accomplice!, the fatherly talk (pp. 957–958)
Of us three, it was Mario who had spent the most time with Himself, sometimes travelling with him for location-work. I had no idea what they spoke about together, or how openly. None of us had ever pressed Mario to say much about it. It occurred to me to wonder why this was so.
Context
The triangle's third leg, and the one scene 150 already named from Jim's side: the father was easy only with Mario. Hal registers it as a plain fact of distribution — Mario got the most hours, the location trips, whatever they said to each other — and then catches himself never having asked, none of them ever having asked, what those two talked about. The not-asking is the tell. Hal can map exactly how the father's limited supply of presence got divided among the three sons — the open talk to Orin, the silent easy company to Mario — and locate himself, precisely, as the one who got neither. He wonders why no one ever pressed Mario, but the real question underneath is the one he won't quite ask: why he himself was the son his father could reach least of all.