The caterers had expressed a contrary view of the assembled chairs; they wanted more room at the back of the tent for the folding tables. The ceremony couldn’t be over soon enough, not in the caterers’ opinion. After all, they had to rearrange all the chairs around the unfolded tables, setting up the tent for the reception dinner.

Meanwhile, the action on the croquet court took an unpleasant turn. The two girl jocks who slept in their own small tent and took showers together had just taken a shower. They were both wrapped in undersize towels and brushing each other’s hair in the sun, in an effort to dry their hair before they got dressed for the wedding. Thus scantily wrapped in their too-small towels, and up to their own business, the two athletic-looking young women had attracted the attention of the not-very-bright barbecue chef. While waving his spatula over the preheating barbecue, and being careful not to step on the crawling diaper man, the barbecue chef kept giving sidelong glances to the two girl jocks in their skimpy towels.

There was nothing sidelong about the looks Henrik gave to the girl jocks in their fetching towels. Henrik, dillydallying with his irrelevant lacrosse stick, gawked at the girls from the stance he’d taken in the middle of the croquet court, where he aggressively occupied the space between the smoking grill and the big tent belonging to the rest of the girl jocks—wherever they were. I suspected they weren’t in their big tent, where they would have been sweltering. It was a hot, sunny day—typical of an early afternoon in July.

The girls drying their hair ignored Henrik, who kept leering at them. Henrik was cradling an old croquet ball in his stupid lacrosse stick, as if he were fondling one of his own testicles. The croquet ball—a faded maroon, long exposed to all kinds of weather—must have been lost in the bushes, where Henrik had dug it out with his lacrosse stick. It was barely recognizable as the brightly colored ball it once had been, but the crawling diaper man recognized it. The infant emeritus may have stopped speaking and lost the ability to walk, but—even on his hands and knees—the diaper man knew one of his old croquet balls when he saw it. Circling Henrik on all fours, Principal Brewster bit the distracted midfielder in the area of his Achilles tendon. Possibly Henrik’s habit of wearing unmatching socks had further enraged the principal emeritus. We’ll never know. What could the diaper man tell us?