“Remember, think about something sad,” he’d say to his daughters before they entered the office buildings.

“Like if Mom and you died?” asked Pía, confused, the first time her father said it. Her eyes grew watery and intense.

The father corrected himself. “No, no. Not that. Not so sad. What I mean is that you can’t go around laughing or playing or cracking jokes while you wait for me. I want you to pretend to be sad. Fake sad, like the actresses on TV . . . and then I’ll take you out for french fries and the three of us will laugh by ourselves.”

Pía smiled in relief, happy at the idea of french fries. But her eyes filled up with tears again when Simona told her: “You know what I think about to get sad? I imagine Mom and Dad are going to break up.”

Simona raised her eyes to look defiantly at the sun. She’d been warned so often not to do that, but now she felt utterly confident, capable of absorbing all the sun’s rays. Because this morning would be different. This morning they would triumph, and all the effort and failure that had come before would be worth it. And she had planned it all. Finally, her help would do some good.

She’d been trying to contribute for a long time. In the afternoons, she sat at the kitchen table next to her father with her own pile of newspapers in front of her, and she went through them looking for any and all job advertisements. She marked them with a fluorescent highlighter, cut them out carefully, and glued them onto a white page. Once the page was covered in pasted ads, she filed it in a folder labeled CLASSIFIED ADS FOR DAD. At the end of the day, she handed the folder to him with all the gravity the situation called for.

She was driven and enthusiastic, but not because she wanted her father to find a job. Nor because she wanted to end her parents’ fights, or the family’s economic straits. Rather, she longed for her father to be again the way he used to be.

At first, when she found out he’d been fired, she couldn’t help but feel satisfied. She didn’t tell a soul, but she was pleased. Finally, she would have fun with her father all day long! Every day! And it was summer vacation, too—it was like a dream. Nothing would get in the way of their games: not work, which left him so tired at night; not her mother, either.