Gately's staff snippets

McDade, complimenting Gately's shirt, produces a father in a single throwaway subordinate clause — a dad who bowled, until the thumb. It's the smallest father in these pages, mentioned only to be dropped, and that's its use: in the Ennet House snippets fathers surface constantly as one-line data, a bowler minus a thumb, a Daddy sucking air, a Daddy you don't know is alive. The casual mutilation ("when he still had a thumb") lands with no follow-up, the way damage does in this house — everybody's got a maimed patriarch in a subordinate clause, and nobody stops the conversation for it.