On the doorstep to her family’s house, Mr. Avalon now handed her a CD. “Listen to track four. ‘Historia de un Amor.’ It takes huge range, a real virtuosa, and I’ve never found a singer strong enough to put it in the show, but I have a feeling that maybe I have this year.” Mr. Avalon winked.
Rebekkah listened to the track over and over that night, and the next day, at rehearsals, she offered an a cappella rendition. Even as she squinted her eyes to belt out the high notes, Rebekkah could see her fellow club members gaping, could also see the bright, slightly bent way Mr. Avalon watched on. Was there anything in this world that had ever made her happier than the way Mr. Avalon listened to her sing? He leaned into her voice like a houseplant to a window, as if her lungs were shedding some life-giving sustenance. When rehearsals were over, Mr. Avalon snagged her by her blouse. “That was marvelous,” Mr. Avalon said. “You are a very, very special creature.”
“Thank you,” Rebekkah said.
“But you know, I was worrying about you the whole night. And I got something for you, but I can’t give it to you here.”
Rebekkah cocked her head, and what Mr. Avalon told her next hit her bloodstream like sickness, an infection of gratitude replicating itself. “I don’t want to make any of the other kiddos jealous,” he said. “I’ve got some paperwork to do. Find me outside in a few?”
Less tipsy than the day before, Rebekkah waited for Mr. Avalon in the parking lot outside the school. And it was there, as she was trying to strike a cross-legged sophisticated-looking pose on the hot grill of a bench, that Rebekkah saw him for the first time: a young man who found Mr. Avalon as he came out of the school, his briefcase swinging. This guy marched up to Rebekkah’s teacher, as if they might hug or at least shake hands, but they did neither. A brown patch of schoolyard lay between Rebekkah and the two curtly speaking men, and she had trouble getting a read on this new person. He carried himself in the self-conscious way of a teenager, but his boyish face was incongruous beneath a shaved head. She couldn’t hear a word of what he and Mr. Avalon said, but from the tight way they carried their shoulders, from the way Mr. Avalon kept flinching as if he might march away, she sensed that the conversation was an unpleasant one.
“An old student,” Mr. Avalon explained when he at last came to Rebekkah. “Dropped by to say hi.”
“Oh,” Rebekkah said, her gaze drifting back to this old student, who had not budged from his spot near the school’s side door. He still just stood there, watching Rebekkah and Mr. Avalon speak. Rebekkah was relieved to climb onto the cool leather bench seat of his vintage Cadillac. But, after an awkwardly silent drive, when they arrived at his house, Rebekkah hesitated. She had seen how her father was with the world—jovial, generous, attentive—an identity he seemed to take off with his business suit at home. At home, Rebekkah’s father was afflicted by “nerves.” “Nerves” was her father’s term for the undetonated minefield of his personality, a wrong step in any direction triggering a charge. Anything Rebekkah said might set him off, and an hour later, Rebekkah would be tending to a fresh welt as her mother persuaded her to apologize to him.
Mr. Avalon, however, seemed just the opposite; in his cluttered pueblo, he came more fully into his kindness.
“So!” Mr. Avalon clapped his hands. “Are you ready for your surprise?”
The surprise was waiting in an outbuilding, a little wood and asbestos shed across a flat. The surprise bounded out as soon as Mr. Avalon opened the door. “How?” Rebekkah said breathlessly. How could Mr. Avalon have known exactly what she had wanted since her ninth birthday? A little black fur ball, a squirming pug, twelve inches of adorable that was all hers. She hoisted the whining dog, pressed it against her face. A realization, both wonderful and also horrible: not all adults were like her parents. Easier to believe in a world in which everyone dealt with secrets, bruises to cover, a memory of a mother asleep in her own sick to wash away with daytime gin. Sorrowful to think that she might have been Mr. Avalon’s daughter, that another life could have existed with a father like him.
“Oh, geez, did I do something wrong? Why are you crying?”
Rebekkah bit her lip and shook her head. “We’ll have to keep her here. My parents would never let me have her at home.”
“Of course, we’ll do that. You can visit her every day. The only thing you have to worry about is what you’ll name her.”
The next weeks were very happy. Each day, after rehearsals, Rebekkah visited Mr. Avalon and Edwina, and she ate four-compartment frozen dinners, after which her teacher helped her with her homework, his own theater assignments and otherwise. As for payment, Mr. Avalon would just tap at his own rough cheek on parting, and Rebekkah would give it a quick little kiss. The first term ended, and her report card became one less trigger to her father’s “nerves.” She hadn’t yet told Mr. Avalon about what it was like with her parents, but sometimes, as they hunched together over her geometry textbook, he ran his fingers near a furious Ping-Pong ball of a bruise on her shoulder, and his eyes watered. She wouldn’t have known how to explain it, and she was glad Mr. Avalon didn’t make her try. And yet, one day, on another ride to his house, Mr. Avalon’s mood had shifted like her dad’s daily arrival at the doorstep. When she asked about his day, he sniffed the Cadillac’s leathery air, as if she had just filled it with a fart.
“What were you talking to Oliver Loving for?” Mr. Avalon asked later, over a pepperoni pizza dinner.
“Oliver?” She thought of the kind, nerdish boy she chatted with before first period literature, the boy who had nudged a nervous hand toward her that one night when his father had invited her to the meteor showers. The truth was that when Rebekkah talked with Oliver, she thought often about Mr. Avalon’s kindness to her, how she should pay it forward.
“He seems lonely, but he’s really nice.”
“Don’t play stupid. I saw you acting all—” Mr. Avalon did a grotesque imitation of girlish flirting, batting at his hair and giggling. “His family is not like yours or mine. For your information, they couldn’t know one thing about what it’s like to be like us.”
Mr. Avalon was standing now, a posture very much like her father’s, gathering a dark charge.
“To be special, you have to be broken. It’s the trade-off. A boy like Oliver Loving couldn’t understand that.”