JOI's father's tennis monologue

The black widow runs through all three generations, and here it's literal — a "nasty fat spider flexing in its web" in the garage, the father arming the boy with a racquet to kill it for him. The grandfather "had a healthy respect for spiders," refusing to sit on the ground under the frond-palms; the father blames a "mad rogue" widow (or frond-pus) for the slip that ruined his knees; and JOI grows up to develop the full "conscious horror" of the Southwest's black widows that scene 012 measures Orin's diluted version against (and that scene 020's biography folds into his death-obsessions). The widow is the family's hereditary dread, handed down the male line like the drink and the predictions — and the first thing the father does with it is make the son do the killing.