I’ll admit that the boyfriend, in the tent nearest the birdbath, was a dipshit ski bum. He was a worthless whiner who struck me as too lazy to look very far for a bathroom. He obviously thought I was older than fourteen, because he complained to me about his girlfriend’s yeast infection. “I didn’t come all this way to sleep in a tent with a girl who can’t or won’t do it,” he told me. “She should have said she had a friggin’ yeast infection!”

Naturally, I asked Nora what a yeast infection was. I must have been concerned that I could catch it. Nora made me tell her who had one, and how I’d heard about it. “The girl jock with the boyfriend who pees in the birdbath—she has it. He told me,” I confided to Nora. I could see that Em was as fearful of the yeast infection as I was; she buried her face in Nora’s boobs and shook against her. That was how the yeast infection made me feel, too.

“Relax, you wimps—you’re safe,” Nora told us. She then told Molly and my mom about the incident.

The night groomer said she’d handle it. I didn’t realize Molly meant she would handle the boyfriend—the alleged birdbath pisser—but Molly dragged him out of his small tent when he had only his boxers on, and she held his head underwater in the birdbath. Whatever was in the birdbath, it was clear the ski bum couldn’t breathe in it. The girl jock with the yeast infection halfheartedly protested the snowcat operator’s way of handling the situation. “You may tell everyone you know about your yeast infection, Nelly,” the trail groomer said, “but I don’t want Adam the Kid hearing about it.” Nelly didn’t know her boyfriend had been advertising her yeast infection; she wandered off in the garden, seemingly indifferent to the prospect of the ski bum dying in the birdbath, but Molly had made her point and stopped drowning him. This was the afternoon of the day before the wedding, and Nelly’s boyfriend packed up the small tent and his other belongings and left, unceremoniously, before the festivities started. There were two stone sparrows, permanently perched on the rim of the birdbath; throughout my childhood, one of those never-singing songbirds had a chipped beak. Only those sparrows made of stone knew for sure if the ski bum had ever peed in the birdbath. Nelly moved into the big tent on the former croquet court with her fellow girl jocks.