The Man From Glad and the mattress (pp. 497–498)
My father’s mood surrounded him like a field and affected any room he occupied, like an odor or a certain cast to the light.
Context
This is the hypervigilant meteorology of the child of a volatile parent, and Jim has it down to a physics. The father's mood isn't a state, it's a field — a weather that changes the light and the air of any room — and the boy narrates the whole chore by reading its barometry: the elevation, the souring, the exact instant it's "no longer elevated." The same surveillance runs the other direction and lands on the boy's body: when Jim offers, almost tenderly, that his own bed squeaks too, the father weaponizes it — "Oh, we hear your bed, don't you worry. You so much as turn over in bed up there? We hear it down here." The son who monitors the father's every mood-shift is himself monitored down to the turning-over, a household where everyone is listening through the floor for everyone else.