Dottie had a harness with her, and a short leash—of the kind attached to Seeing Eye dogs. Thus was the diaper man dragged away. If a look could speak, it was easy to interpret the cursory glance Dottie gave to Henrik, who’d lost control of his lacrosse stick when he’d been bitten. Dottie’s glance gave Henrik some idea of what Dottie woulda done in Maine, where she would have bitten his throat. The croquet ball had briefly rolled free, but not for long. The baby emeritus had grabbed it and stuffed it in his diaper.

I wished I could read lips. I wanted to know the unspoken words the diaper man was mouthing, as Dottie led him (still on his hands and knees) to the Front Street house. Whatever the infant in reverse kept repeating to himself, he seemed sure about it.

“Son of the Bride,” the old Austrian musician whispered to me. “You’re not a lip-reader, are you?”

“No,” I answered him. He was returning to his small table and unattended zither.

“I am,” the zither man said, almost indifferently. “Your grandfather was saying, ‘My ball, my ball’—over and over again.”

I didn’t know if I believed the zither-meister. It was too easy to guess that’s what Granddaddy Lew had been thinking, though how would the edelweiss man have known that Principal Brewster was the only croquet player in the family?

My grandmother had left the wedding tent immediately after the biting. She’d told me she was going to rescue the caterers from Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha, who were poking their noses into everything in the kitchen. I decided to leave the wedding tent, too, upon the appearance of my aunts on the croquet court, where they’d arrived with a first-aid kit to attend to the wound in Henrik’s Achilles tendon. Henrik sat cross-legged on the court while my aunts fussed over him. One of the girl jocks had picked up Henrik’s lacrosse stick. She was handling it like she knew what she was doing. The other girl jock had her hands on her hips while she stood over Henrik, looking down at him. The two girl jocks seemed to enjoy my aunts’ disapproval of the girls’ skimpy towels—not to mention how the fallen Henrik had been humiliated by a biter on all fours in a diaper.