The Da's death, and the toast Matty still lifts to him

pivotal · UNDATED (Matty seventeen; the toast standing thereafter)

• When: UNDATED (when Matty was seventeen; the memorial toast standing into the present)
• What: The father died of pancreatic complaints when Matty was seventeen — not the quiet slump one imagines, but choking on aspirated blood, "a veritable fountain of the darkest possible blood," his atomized blood hanging in the air, cat-yellow eyes open and face rictused in pain, while Matty held the man's yellow wrists and his mother lumbered off down the ward for a crash-cart team. The characterizing coda: whenever Matty drinks, he still opens the binge with a private toast to the memory of the father who abused him — the ambivalence at the center of the character kept exactly as the text leaves it.