Quote 1
"And I know maybe you're thinking about Doug … aw, s***, Karl, I didn't get along with your dad and all but I did love him and I miss him, too … s***. What I was going to say is that he was the mayor here, they elected him three times, and Shoemaker Avenue is named after his great-grandpa […] The cemetery is full of his people and my people, and we all go to college." (2.67)
Beth Shoemaker is one of the first literary moms we've met who actually attempts to lecture her kid about the importance of college when she herself never went and is drunk while giving said lecture. Really, Karl probably ends up in college prep classes because of a drunk monologue his mom doesn't really remember giving—not because he owes something to his family's legacy.
Quote 2
At first we thought that that sad pile of torn paper could be put back together like a puzzle. But it quickly turned out to be hopeless; the dried-out pieces broke in our hands, that old gravity furnace made it so hot up in my room, and so dry, that four winters had pretty much destroyed it.
After a while we both gave up; there was no way to get it all laid out and then tape it together."I'm so sorry, Karl," she said. Her eyes were clear and calm, like the Mom I remembered; I almost cried right then. (23.111-113)
Karl didn't just lose his dad—in the aftermath of his father's death, he lost his mom, and she became someone barely recognizable to him. The incident with tearing up the list, though, seems to bring her back to reality, providing a wake-up call of what she's actually done to her son.