She worked as a maid and had a brief first marriage, which produced my eldest brother, Luis. She was a single working mother, long before anyone called it that. My mother says she fell in love with my father right away because he was a serious man as well as a gentleman. They married in 1963 in Consuelo. It's a small town about 50 miles east of Santo Domingo.
Most people work the sugar-cane fields and live in houses rented from sugar companies.
My parents both worked, and my mother had five more children. What memories I have of those early days are happy ones. My dad drove a tractor and my mom, who was a good cook, sold homemade food. That all changed in the summer of 1975. My father started having terrible headaches.