Tennis and the Feral Prodigy (pp. 172–173)
Hit about a thousand serves to no one while Himself sits and advises with his flask. […] You still, years after the man’s death, cannot keep your keys anywhere but on the floor.
Context
The father presides over the dawn ritual as a seated, flask-bearing overseer while the boy hits a thousand serves to no one — and the training outlasts him. The keys-drill (serve, fall forward into the court, scoop the keys off the ground to groove the follow-through) leaves a mark the son can't undo: "years after the man's death," Hal still can't keep his keys anywhere but the floor. It's the same posthumous-gesture logic as Orin shaving "as he was taught" (scene 012) — the father dead, the body still obeying the drill — but here the drill and the flask sit in the same frame, so the thing that persists in the son and the thing that killed the father are looking right at each other.