AA meeting, the Raquel-mask speaker
the foster family’s quiet smiling patriarch, who worked 0900 to 2100 as a claims processor for Aetna, it turned out that the cheerful smiling foster father actually made the wacko foster mother look like a Doric column of stability by comparison
Context
The predatory pole, daughter-side, surfacing in an AA speaker's testimony: the foster household's "quiet smiling patriarch," a nine-to- nine Aetna claims processor, turns out to be the one nightly preying on the family's catatonic biological daughter. Held strictly to the theme's dyad angle, this is the book's flattest portrait of father-as-predator — the smile is the entire tell, a paternal mildness that is itself the horror, worse than the overtly deranged mother precisely because it hides in plain domestic sight behind a normal job. What the sighting adds to the anthology is register: predation here wears the costume of the most ordinary imaginable father. (The extended mask-and-statue detail is left per sightings mode; see Flags.)