Who he is: the low-pH chemist of Shiny Prize — the reagent shop, the inherited farm, the dandelion attar

texture · UNDATED (standing, Joelle's childhood through YDAU)

• When: UNDATED (standing identity; attested from Joelle's childhood into the YDAU present)
• What: Joe Lon van Dyne is Joelle's father and the family's one fixed profession: a low-pH chemist — acids, proton donors, litmus-red chemistry — of Shiny Prize, Kentucky. The full style comes from Joelle herself, asking Orin to sign a football "for her Own Personal Daddy, one Joe Lon van Dyne of Shiny Prize KY," and, as she said, of the Dyne-Riney Proton Donor Reagent Corp. of nearby Boaz KY (scene 068; Joelle's words inside a narrated frame). Her own pre-suicide self-introduction gives the family shape: reared on family land east of Shiny Prize, "the only child of a low-pH chemist and his second wife" (scene 062, Joelle-focalized; on the wives, see the Dating notes). Notkin's interrogation account matches the trade — "a low-pH chemist for a Kentucky reagent outfit" — while giving different names and geography (event 8; Dating notes). Per Joelle to Gately, the farm wasn't his: "her late mother's own Daddy had left them a farm," and Joelle's Daddy moved them out there and "jick-jacked around with farming," mostly as an excuse to keep lots of pets and put experimental low-pH stuff in the soil (scene 166). He never names his dogs — pointers, loyal, recurring in every carrier (scenes 068, 159, 166). The shop's other half is "Uncle Lum," Mr. Lum Riney, "my Daddy's partner over to the shop," who breathed some kind of fume at the shop when Joelle was little and got strange (scene 166, Joelle to Gately; on the uncles, see the Dating notes). And the chemistry reached his daughter's very scent: the "almost pungently clean line-dried-laundry scent that hung about her" at B.U. was a special low-pH dandelion attar he decocted for her in Shiny Prize (scene 068, narrated).