In the meantime, today, Sunday, the surprise guest, the picnic—this came as not just a respite but a blessing for the citizens of Beaumont, Texas. At the Beaumont train station, the burbling crowd drowned out the purple mourning doves cooing on the statues to Progress and Industry. Church bells were swinging as ineffectively as if the clappers had been stolen, for no one was at church.

There was a crow’s nest fifty feet west of the station, and in it was a twelve-year-old girl who had courage and a spyglass. She wore exceptionally clean overalls and boots that had never known mud, and she had wind-burned skin, a brown-eyed stare pegged to eternity, and black hair that went easily into pigtails, and this was the single obedient part of her.

Her name was Rebecca Golod, and her fertile kin, all of them industrious, energetic, and argumentative, had come to Texas from the steppes of Russia ten years before, with stops in Toronto (not very friendly), Detroit (the same), Chicago (too many other Jews—it was like Russia all over again), and Biloxi (who wanted to live in Biloxi?). The Golods owned an entire block of Beaumont stores now, with cousins and nieces and nephews who flowed through the Russia-to-Texas pipeline as efficiently as any light sweet crude. Had there been a family crest, it would have shown two rampant hawks with beaks pinching each other’s necks.

Roughly half of the family was crooked. The shady half was perpetually blackmailing the noble half to pay off gambling debts, drinking bills, schemes to open opium dens. Rebecca’s spyglass was the only keepsake her grandfather had successfully smuggled out of Russia, having lost even the family samovar to guards at the Austrian border. She had determined that, among the screaming and shouting, she could distinguish herself, and still induce the kind of rage that seemed to mean that your parents truly loved you, by becoming the quietest, most humble, and most honest of all Golods. The type of girl who had organized her dolls by height (then, as she assigned them personalities, in order of their self-discipline), she decided she could be entrusted with delicate things, and so the spyglass was freed from Grandfather’s closet and now comfortably dangled on a chain around her neck.

As one relative, then another spotted her in the crow’s nest, each wailed as if hit in the foot with a mallet, looked for someone else in the family to blame, then called for her to come down and hand the spyglass back to Grandfather, but Rebecca put her finger to her lips, looked piqued, as if they were embarrassing her, and returned to looking for the 8:16 train.