“Not to mention a bride who had a child the way you did, Ray,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“Baloney,” my mom told them. “I’m wearing a white wedding dress. Molly helped me pick it out.”

The wedding was the first occasion any of us had to meet Molly, the trail groomer. If it came to a showdown, the snowcat operator looked as if she could go toe-to-toe with Nora. In the little snowshoer’s estimation, Molly and Nora each weighed 175 pounds. They were two big and strong young women. Over the course of the wedding weekend, those two kept eyeing each other—as if they were dying to get into a fight, or into some other trouble.

The sleeping arrangements for the wedding weekend were too confusing for scrutiny; not even my aunts could be bothered with who slept where, or with whom. Those girl jocks from Stowe, used to dormitory living, pitched three tents in the backyard of the Front Street house. My grandmother felt their tents were too near the garden, where the wedding tent was. One of the girl jocks brought her boyfriend; their tent, nearest the ornamental birdbath in the garden, was the smallest one. Two of the girl jocks—the same two who took showers together—had their own tent, too. The biggest tent was for the rest of the girl jocks from Stowe; there were three or four of them, and they pitched their tent on the former croquet court, unused for years. Nana said the tent wasn’t safe on the old croquet court, where she predicted someone would come to harm or be killed.

Yes, the croquet court had been improperly cared for, but I doubted it was capable of murder. A mishap had once caused a gardener to quit: an old wicket, lurking just above ground, had wrecked his lawn mower. Years ago, someone had used a croquet mallet to hammer the stakes and the wickets into the lawn. Principal Brewster had been blamed for this, but I’ll bet the pounder was Nora, not the principal emeritus—not even before he was in diapers, when he was capable of wielding a mallet. Over time, a few of the wickets had worked their way back above ground—or someone had pulled them level to the lawn. I’ll bet the wicket-puller was the diaper man; the infant emeritus was the only member of the family who’d played croquet on the backyard lawn.

My grandmother was distraught over the excessive bathroom use by what she called “the tent dwellers,” but what were the girl jocks supposed to do—go in the garden? Nana had already accused the boyfriend of peeing in the birdbath, solely on the grounds that she’d seen no birds bathing there since he’d arrived.