Origins: the cigarette-burn courtship, The Bride and The Brood

texture · UNDATED (childhood, B.S. era, Partridge KS)

• When: UNDATED (Stice's Kansas childhood, B.S. era; southwest Kansas, "might as well be Oklahoma")
• What: Ortho Stice is one of seven children ("The Brood") of a crop-insurance salesman and his wife ("The Bride") who met and fell in star-crossed love in a Country/Western bar in Partridge KS (outside Liberal KS, on the Oklahoma border) playing a bar-game in which two people lay a lit cigarette in the valley of their pressed-together forearms until one jerks away — the Stices each found in the other someone who wouldn't jerk away, and their forearms stay burn-scarred to this day. Divorced and remarried "four or five times," they oscillate between locked-bedroom reconciliations (gin, Chinese take-out, the Brood wandering ghostlike in sagging diapers) and connubial war (The Bride cooking and then hurling multicourse meals at the walls). Stice loves them "to distraction, but not blindly," and memorizes the highlights of their battles each holiday to regale the upperclassmen at meals. Adjacent Kansas texture: the family pointer Horace, lost to coyote-bait when Ortho was nine and "much missed by the whole Stice brood" (scene 108). His Boston-side family presence, meanwhile, is the aunts: the legendarily dysfunctional parents stay in Kansas, but "two vaguely lesbianic maiden aunts or great-aunts or something up in Chelsea" keep bringing him foods the staff won't let him eat (endnote n185) — the nearby guardians whose name he mews at the limit of dawn-drill endurance (event 9).