She was patient. She studied hard. She never demanded what you could not give. While other children complained about hand-me-down clothes or old lunch tins, she only smiled and said, “I know, Papá. It’s okay.” In school, she collected top marks the way some children collect stickers. Teachers would stop you in the street to tell you how bright she was, how disciplined, how different.
When she was accepted into the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, she ran home with the letter in her hand, tears shining in her eyes.
“Papá, I got in!”
You still remember the way your workshop smelled that afternoon. Fresh-cut pine. Varnish. Rain in the distance. She threw her arms around your neck, and you held her so tightly that she laughed and told you that you were crushing her.
You were proud. God, you were proud.
And you were afraid.
Mexico City was far from your little town. Nearly five hundred kilometers away. To you, it may as well have been another planet. But when you looked at your daughter, at the hunger in her eyes for a future wider than the riverbanks of your village, you knew keeping her close would be another kind of loss.
So you told her, “Go, hija. Your father will be fine.”
You lied a little. But that is also part of parenthood.
The university years flew by in the strange way painful things do. Slowly when you are inside them, quickly once they are gone. Sofía stayed in the city after graduation and found work at a logistics company. She called often in those first years. Sometimes while you were sanding table legs. Sometimes while you were heating tortillas over the stove. Sometimes just to ask, in that same soft voice from childhood, “Papá, did you eat? Did you take your medicine? Is your back hurting again?”
