I watched with eyes wide open and listened to the only person in Pig Park still making money. “As you all know, Pig Park has reached out for help and for answers. What is it that draws us to a thing? Most often it’s recognition, our senses open up and something in the back of our mind clicks,” Peregrino said. He stroked the thick gold chain that hung around the outside of his turtleneck. He pulled out a large piece of paper from his briefcase and waved his hand in front of it like a model on one of those TV game shows. “Behold the solution to Pig Park’s problems.”
Marcos, Josefina’s brother, angled his head. Shiny shoulder length hair swept away from his face and revealed a square jaw line and high cheek bones. He snickered.
Peregrino’s visual aid was a map of Pig Park—the actual park our neighborhood was named after—with an oversized cutout of a pyramid from a schoolbook or a magazine taped to it.
Josefina looked at Marcos with thick brown eyebrows in a scrunch. I looked at my dad. My dad looked at my mom. My mom crossed her arms over her chest, shook her head from side to side and sighed.
I squinted at the picture just to make sure. “He wants us to fix Pig Park by putting up a giant pyramid right smack in the middle of everything?” I asked.
“How is this going to help?” my dad asked. He leaned forward on the lopsided legs of his chair, facing Peregrino. My mom reached out and grabbed my dad’s chair to keep him from spilling onto the grass.
“You have to think of it like the Picassos downtown. Except no one this side of North America has a pyramid. Building a Gran Pirámide right here is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Peregrino said.
“What are you talking about?” Mr. Nowak, Josefina’s dad, interrupted. Mrs. Nowak squeezed his large white hand with her small brown one.
Peregrino didn’t miss a beat. “Pyramids are among the most recognizable symbols in the history of mankind, from Egypt to MesoAmerica. Think of the Aztecs, the Mayans and the Incas. People will see it and come. First out of curiosity, then more. There will be so many people, you won’t know what hit you. They will be good people too, the kind who care about history and culture.”
“That’s your thinking? We’re going to keep from becoming a ghost town neighborhood or a massive parking lot by putting up a pyramid for people to gawk at?” Mr. Nowak didn’t miss a beat either. “THAT’S going to help my grocery store?”
Josefina turned to me in that way she always had since kindergarten and whispered. “That’s crazy.”
“Seriously. We’re not Aztecs,” I said.
“How much is it going to cost?” My mom stood and bellowed over us. It was typical for her to ask about money. The stress of tracking the bakery’s accounts was turning her hair to ash and stamping crow’s feet into the corners of her eyes.
“You decide how to build it and how much to spend. I didn’t come up with this idea on my own. The man who came up with it, Dr. Humberto Vidales Casal, is a world-renowned scholar and community development expert who cures neighborhoods. He knows his stuff. There is a small fee for his guidance. However, when we are finished, La Gran Pirámide will more than pay for itself,” Peregrino said.
“Well, that doesn’t sound so bad,” my dad said. He rose to stand beside my mom. “It’s an investment.” Some of the grown-ups from restaurant row, like Mr. Fernandez and Mrs. Sustaita, nodded. Mr. Nowak clicked his tongue. A few of the others grumbled.
Colonel Franco cleared his throat. “It’s better than doing nothing. We don’t even need that much money. We have other resources.” Despite the Pancho Villa mustache, Colonel Franco wasn’t some long lost revolutionary hero. He was a retired Army man and president of the Pig Park Chamber of Commerce. He didn’t own a business, but thirty-plus years of bravery, leadership and service to the U.S. of A meant something. He had built bridges in Iraq and Afghanistan as a senior officer. “A pyramid is little more than simple geometry. Two triangles here, two triangles there. I can lead the construction project,” he said and waved his hand.
The grown-ups huddled together. Colonel Franco had hit on it with fewer words: a crazy plan had to be better than no plan at all. After a long while, even Mr. Nowak was drawing short breaths around the thing. They were desperate enough that they decided every neighborhood girl and boy would report to the park to help Colonel Franco with the construction. They said it as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, as if we knew how to do that sort of thing. They less enthusiastically agreed to scrape together what little money we had for Dr. Vidales Casal’s fee and wire it to him by the end of the week.
Applause came in small bursts like the kernels in a microwaveable popcorn bag.
Peregrino folded the drawing and stuffed it back into his briefcase.
What else was there to say? I waved goodbye to Josefina and followed my parents home. I took one tiny step after another. My parents shrunk further and further away. I walked as slow as my body would go.
I thought hard about the morning’s events. It’d all happened so fast like cars on the expressway, shooting by so quick you wouldn’t want to get caught in the way of one. I didn’t know exactly what to make of it.
Then something clicked.
My right leg tap-danced with no direction from me. My cheeks pushed up against my ears.
I would get to spend the summer outside with my friends.
Chapter 3
The small hand on the clock hovered over the six. I pulled the bakery’s blinds and locked the door. I walked upstairs and down the hall.
“We can’t do this. We won’t even cover our costs this year. We don’t have money for that man’s fee,” my mom said to my dad.
So much for trying to find the positive in this.
My mom pushed her fingers through the ash of her hair. She waved the envelope I recognized as the letter from the bank in the air and lectured my dad about money with all the passion of one of those TV preachers.
“You heard, it’ll more than pay for itself,” my dad said.
A few things had kept the bakery afloat. My parents owned the building and the equipment—though the equipment was old and worth little more than a cumin seed. There was no payroll since my mom, dad and I were unpaid employees. But we still had to pay utilities, supplies, taxes and permits. My dad had mortgaged the building the year before just to get by.
“We have enough,” my dad insisted. “We’ll put off some of the bills a little longer.”
“Dad, Mom,” I interrupted. Both turned to look at me. “Are we going to be okay?”
Neither answered.
“We’re working things out,” my dad finally said. “You just worry about getting to the park tomorrow.” My mom shook her head from side to side and chewed on her bottom lip. She walked away.
Of course, they couldn’t just say everything was wonderful or everything was going to crap. They couldn’t know for sure. The bakery had seen its share of struggles already.
According to my dad’s stories, my abuelita Carmelita Burciaga—his mother—was a widow who’d made ends meet by taking in other people’s laundry back in Mexico. She’d accepted a baker as a second husband so that my dad would learn a respectable trade. My dad’s then narrow frame, once fragile like the spine of a book, had grown straight and strong from kneading masa and from not toiling in the sun. It had been good going until the torrid summer the baker died. His blood relatives evicted my abuelita