Joelle cleaning; the Incandenza Thanksgiving (pp. 742–743)
Jim later told Joelle that he simply didn’t know how to speak with either of his undamaged sons without their mother’s presence and mediation. […] Jim said he suspected he and Mario were so easy with each other only because the boy had been too damaged and arrested even to speak to until he was six, so that both he and Jim had got a chance to become comfortable in mutual silence
Context
Because Joelle became close to Jim, the anthology gets its one direct transcript of the father's own account, and it inverts Orin's: the distance wasn't dislike, it was a man who literally "didn't know how" to talk to a son without Avril in the room to mediate — Orin filling every silence with blather, Hal so shut down the quiet was "excruciating." And the tell is Mario. Jim is easy with the one son the world calls damaged precisely because the damage bought them time in "mutual silence" with nothing to perform, no tennis, no pressure to bond on cue. So the father pours his best fathering into the child who couldn't demand it, and goes mute before the two who could — the theme's cruelest arithmetic, that the sons built to receive a father are the ones he can't reach.