I worked in the bakery from when I was, oh, eight? Maybe seven. Eight. My father would come in my room at four. Four in the morning. And he wouldn't turn on the light, he'd just stand in the door and say, mija, the conchas aren't going to sugar themselves. Every morning. Same words. And I'd get up and put on my shoes, no socks, and go down the back stairs, and the back of the shop was already hot. He'd been up since two-thirty.
So I got the letter, from UT, in Austin, for the pharmacy school. And I was the first one. Nobody in my family had been to college. My father couldn't read English very well, so I read it to him, in the back, by the ovens. And he didn't say anything. He took the letter, and he folded it, and he went to the front, and he opened the register and lifted up the tray, and he put my letter under the tray. And that's where it stayed. For years. When the bakery closed, my brother cleaned out the register, and the letter was still in there. Yellow. With flour on it.
Oh, but, the fair. HemisFair, downtown. That was the summer of sixty-seven. We went, the four of us, on a Sunday afternoon, which was a very big deal, my father in his good shirt. And there's the Tower, the Tower of the Americas, it was brand new. And my father looked at the price, and he looked up at the Tower, and he said, I can see the whole city from the roof of the bakery. And we did not go up. We went home and he took us up on the roof. You could see the church and the gas station.