There weren’t many partyers under the tent when the edelweiss man resumed zithering. Nora and Em were out on the dance platform, where a few of the girl jocks were dancing with one another. Small groups of people were gathered at the near-empty tables, just talking or drinking. With the tables cleared, I could more clearly see the floating candles. These misbegotten candles had been the idea of our local fire marshal: candles afloat in bowls of water. If someone knocks over a candle, you have a bowl of water handy to douse the flame. But of course the candles kept getting submerged in the water bowls. Then the wicks were wet, and it was hard to relight them. (Dottie doubtless would have included our local fire marshal among the lamebrained authorities.)

A wedding guest, bored and brainless—Henrik, maybe—had placed one of the floating candles in the birdbath. Thus I went to bed with a larger-than-life image of the stone sparrows perched on the rim: the floating candlelight had cast giant shadows of the birds’ heads and beaks on the roof of the tent above the birdbath. More disturbing than the huge size of the birds was that they appeared to be moving—twitching slightly, or preparing to peck. The candle afloat in the birdbath was never still—it kept moving, just a little. It was an unsettling image to take to bed—enormous, predatory sparrows—but I was relieved to have something else (anything else) to think about.

I needed to stop thinking about what I’d seen, and what it meant. Was it immaterial that my mom either was or wasn’t Elliot Barlow’s beard, now that the snowshoer evidently was a beard for my mother? Just what kind of honeymoon could my mom have with the little snowshoer, now that I’d seen the honeymoon she’d been having with the very big trail groomer? If good-looking and small were the features my mother found most attractive in men, what was I to make of Molly, who was beautiful but big?

These were the troubling thoughts that consumed me as I climbed the attic stairs to my bedroom. I wasn’t afraid of a nighttime visit from my grandfather’s ghost—with or without the night groomer to protect me. I even welcomed a haunting from the diaper man’s restless spirit. If the ghost of the infant emeritus came creeping up the attic stairs, at least I would have someone else to think about. I didn’t know what to think about my mom and Molly and the little snowshoer—I kept trying to imagine them in the rest of my life.