Hugo then saw what was around her neck. It was so incongruous his voice spoke on its own accord. “Good grief! Is that a Zeiss Optical spyglass?”

His heartbeat, which had been hammering in nervousness, mellowed. To see this in Texas made the rest of the world oblique; he felt suspended in a bubble outside of which all was blurred and vague. A Zeiss Optical spyglass was the pride of European technology, a salute to Old World charm and warmth, a slender fluted slide with a reeded edge calibrated for sensitive fingers. His father had one, calling it “too sweet for the workaday,” and they had used it on weekends together, looking for birds. He remembered his father’s hand on his shoulder. “Pardon,” he asked, for the girl had said something.

“It’s my grandfather’s,” she whispered again. He could just barely hear her voice, though she had tiptoed closer, two strides away from his stairs.

“I’m sure it is, but—” He broke off, for his own voice was submerged by the tuba player of the band, who had let out an emotive blat of frustration. Hugo swallowed. “I have one, too. At home. I’ll be careful.”

Hugo had been forgotten by everyone, save Rebecca. Somewhere behind her, someone dropped a bottle, which caused her to look over her shoulder to see one of the hoodlum children, an enormous sixth-grader who was rumored to be twenty-two years old, picking up a hank of broken railway tie and testing for tensile strength by whacking it against one of his callused palms.

As Rebecca approached, Hugo glanced toward the exits, since it was apparent people were walking away. He thought his lecture had worked. But there were actually two distressing developments. First, people were linking arms on the track ahead (putting down blankets so they could sit without dirtying themselves), and, second, the departing Beaumont citizens were only walking as far as the brickyard, where the proprietor, jangling his ring of keys, waved them in.

Hugo, innocent of this view, whispered to Rebecca, “May I hold your Zeiss Optical spyglass?”

There was no reason to let this man touch such a valuable object, but Rebecca realized with a merciless crackle up her spine that such thinking did not become a Golod. Wordlessly, she removed the spyglass from its case, and then took the chain from around her neck, like slipping off a bridle.

Rebecca felt as light and generous as if supported by angels, and Hugo reached for it, cupping his hand as Rebecca confidently, with a determination beyond her years, dropped the spyglass, lens first, onto the concrete platform.

It rolled in a semicircle.

Rebecca found her voice. It was a low, almost subsonic moan that ascended in volume and timbre until it sounded as epic and awful as the misery of a garroted winter wolf.

“You—broke—my—spyglass!”