Joelle and Gately at Ennet House
I saw an old boy cut his hand off with a chainsaw cutting back brush back of the Cumberland when I was fishing with my Daddy. […] My Daddy had to use his belt. […] My Daddy got him to the hospital in his car, like to saved his life. He’d had some training. He could save lives like that.
Context
Trading trauma stories with Gately, Joelle reaches for her Daddy — and the Daddy who surfaces here is the rescuer: belt-tourniquet, drive to the hospital, a man with "some training" who "could save lives like that." This is the bright panel of a father-daughter portrait the book will later blacken past recognition (scene 159's account of the low-pH chemist's creepy regression). For now, in her own telling, he's competent and good in a crisis, the proud childhood memory of a father who saves people. Worth flagging that the whole arc turns on the distance between this Daddy and the one Notkin describes.