That was Little Ray’s intention: to make this point, to end exactly here. Like her other tangents, this had been no tangent at all. Didn’t she begin by holding the snowshoer’s face in her hands? She knew all along she was going to kiss him.

It was a kiss I should have seen coming, but I didn’t—no one saw it coming, except my mother. The lawlessness of the kiss made it unwatchable. Everyone but Elliot looked away. It was a kiss you wished someone had given you. The lawlessness of the kiss made you want it. I wanted someone to kiss me like that.

14. A JUDGMENT CALL

If we hadn’t turned away from the snowshoer kiss, we might not have noticed that the infantile emeritus was choking. At the periphery of my fixation on my mom’s interactions with the snowshoer, I had seen my grandmother wrestle the serving spoon away from Granddaddy Lew. For several months now, I’d been aware of the periodic appearances of the diaper-service truck in the driveway; the regressive emeritus was turning into a two-year-old. His table manners weren’t alone in going backward. The never-a-headmaster had reverted to stuffing his face and shitting in his diapers.

The historic kiss might have gone on forever, but my grandmother had pushed Granddaddy Lew’s forehead to the table; standing behind his chair, she’d begun to hit him between his shoulder blades. The blows to the back of the choking emeritus were resounding.

Showing no signs of oxygen deprivation or dizziness, the snowshoer quickly recovered from the kiss. “If that doesn’t work, Mrs. Brewster, I know another thing you can try,” Elliot Barlow said to my grandmother, as he stepped behind the slumping emeritus. With unexpected strength, the little English teacher clasped his hands above the belly button of the skinny emeritus, jerking him to a sitting position, ramrod straight in his chair. If the never-a-headmaster had been standing, Elliot wouldn’t have been tall enough to exert the diagonally upward pressure on the bottom of Principal Brewster’s diaphragm. These were abdominal thrusts, exerting pressure on whatever was lodged in the trachea of the toddler emeritus—with a little luck, perhaps expelling it.

“We’ll see,” the snowshoer said, between thrusts. “I saw a ski instructor in the St. Anton ski school do this, to dislodge some bratwurst—or that’s what it looked like, when it came out.”