Admitting Gately: a clearly bad-news specimen, let in on honesty alone

pivotal · ~YDPAH (Gately's application, last year)

• When: ~a year before YDAU — Gately's application interview and admission
• What: Pat is the gate through which the novel's other protagonist enters recovery. Gately came to her interview a court-remanded burglar with no interest in getting clean, on nothing but a lukewarm referral from a Peabody-district P.O. — and was grimly up-front about all of it, which by her creed was the qualification: his honesty about his own disinterest and hopelessness was one reason she let so clearly bad-news a specimen in at all. (During the interview he obliviously scratched her epileptic dog's stomach — nobody had told him about Pat's dog thing — while the animal trembled and its eyes rolled up.) Cross-ref Gately's timeline (event 30).