Hal eats the mold (p. 10)
It’s funny what you don’t recall. Our first home, in the suburb of Weston, which I barely remember—my eldest brother Orin says he can remember being in the home’s backyard with our mother in the early spring, helping the Moms till some sort of garden out of the cold yard. March or early April. […] He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air.
Context
The book's second section, and its keynote for everything memory does wrong in this novel, first sentence: "It's funny what you don't recall." Hal owns none of this memory himself — the whole mold incident arrives secondhand, scaffolded on "Orin says he can remember" and "He says I was around five." His formative scene is a hand-me-down, which is exactly the wound scene 179 reopens on p. 953.