Gately's higher power and Bob Death — "Don’s like organic father had been…"
Don’s like organic father had been an Estonian immigrant, a wrought-iron worker, which is like sort of a welder with ambition. He’d broken Gately’s mother’s jaw and left Boston when Gately was in his mother’s stomach.
Context
Gately's actual father is the theme's purest absence: a wrought-iron worker who broke his mother's jaw and left before Gately was born, never once seen, existing for his son as a single fact and, eventually, a single word. Gately only learns the man's name — Bulat — years later, reading it off "a torn and then fuckeduppedly Scotch-taped paper out of her jewelry box after his mother's cirrhotic hemorrhage," a name recovered from the wreckage of the mother the father maimed on his way out. There's no relationship to mine here because there was never any contact; the father is a welder who welded nothing, a violent departure and a taped-together name in a dead woman's box. The theme's absent-father pole reduced to its irreducible minimum.