Breaking Through Read Online Free

job I said I was an American citizen." He rested his head on the steering wheel, gripping it with both
hands. His knuckles turned white. "This means we'll have to go back to the fields." My heart fell to my stomach.
    "Again!" I exclaimed, clenching my teeth. My shoulders felt heavier than ever.
    For the next two weeks, Roberto and I worked picking carrots and thinning lettuce after school and on weekends when it did not rain. We thinned lettuce using a short hoe. When our backs hurt from stooping over, we thinned on our knees. To ease the pain, we took turns lying flat on our stomachs in the furrows and pressing down on each other's backs with our hands. Working together all day, Saturday and Sunday, Roberto and I managed to finish an acre, for which we were paid sixteen dollars.
    Picking carrots was easier than thinning lettuce, but a lot messier. The ground was usually muddy, so our shoes and pants got soaked in mud. We worked on our knees, pulling the carrots out of the ground after they were loosened by a tractor-plow. We topped off the leaves by hand and dumped the carrots in a bucket until it was full. We then emptied the bucket into a burlap sack. We got paid fifteen cents a sack.
    During that time we never had carrots or lettuce with our meals. Since neither of us knew how to cook, baloney sandwiches replaced Mamá's delicious
taquitos.
At supper-time, the hand can opener quickly became our best friend. Almost every day we ate canned ravioli with either canned peas or canned corn. Other times we had chicken noodle
soup. For dessert we had a peanut butter and jam sandwich or vanilla ice cream. For breakfast we had scrambled eggs or Cream of Wheat with globs of butter and sugar.
    Roberto gave up eating baloney sandwiches when he got a part-time job working at noon at Velva's Freeze, a hamburger and ice cream store located on Broadway, a few blocks from the high school. During the lunch hour on school days, he walked to Velva's Freeze and helped serve ice cream cones. He got paid a dollar an hour and had a hamburger with french fries and a Coke every day.
    Mary O'Neill, the owner of Velva's Freeze, was a childless widow in her late fifties. She was short and thin. Her wrinkly, pale skin blended with her short gray hair, and her dark blue eyes sparkled when she talked. Everything she wore was white, including her shoes. The only colors on her were the ketchup and mustard stains on her apron. She liked my brother, and when she found out that he and I were living alone, she invited us to dinner on Saturday. We were to meet her at five-thirty at the ice cream store.
    That Saturday afternoon Roberto and I stopped picking carrots at four o'clock and went home to get ready. We were excited and a bit anxious about eating in a restaurant for the first time. I tried to imagine what it would be like. We heated water in a large pot and poured it into a large aluminum tub. We took a bath in the shed, which was attached to the side of our barrack. Papá built it with
discarded wood from the city dump. We used Fab laundry detergent to wash our hair because soap and shampoo were too mild to cut the sulfur and oil in the water. We dressed in our best clothes and arrived at Velva's Freeze on time.
    "I am so glad you're joining me," Mary said. "Have you been to the Far Western in Guadalupe?"
    "We've been to Guadalupe, but not the Far Western," Roberto responded.
    "Good! We'll go there," she said enthusiastically. "They're famous for their steaks."
    A steak dinner sounded a lot better than canned ravioli. The Far Western restaurant was about nine miles from downtown Santa Maria. It was dimly lit and had dark brown wooden tables and chairs that were thick and heavy. In the middle of one of the dark-paneled walls hung a stuffed moose head with long antlers. I heard deep voices and the clinking of glasses coming from another room. "It's the bar," Mary said, noticing how I was craning to see what it was. "You can't go there—you're