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In truth, my childhood was perfect. My mother fussed over me, but she was very busy and couldn't watch me too closely. My stepfather believed his perfect princess to be utterly incapable of misbehavior and he left me to my own devices as well. He was right. I was an introverted child, an avid reader, solitary and sensitive by nature and content to entertain myself. I was never a nuisance at all, that is until the strong gale of adolescence churned me up into a true harpy. Fortunately, that phase did not last long. The economic hardship my mother referred to in our nightly prayers was irrelevant to me, because no one around us had more abundance than we did. As for my hypothetical inheritance, I saw it for what it was—a fairy tale—and I was careful never to mention it to anyone we knew because they would have found it laughable. More than anything, I was terrified by the thought that my mysterious Chilean father, a bandit like Joaquín Murieta, might one day appear to claim me as his daughter and whisk me away to some far-off land. I couldn't bear the thought of being separated from my mother and Francisco Claro, who was and always will be my only father, even if we do not share the same blood.

But I had better tell the story in its proper order, to avoid confusion. I shall start with my mother, because, to explain who I am, I have to go back to her and my stepfather, whom I have always called Papo.

Molly Walsh, my mother, was born in New York, daughter of Irish immigrants who came to America fleeing the potato famine. In 1849, when her father heard that the streets of California were paved with gold, he joined the caravan of prospectors crossing the continent from east to west with hopes of striking it rich. One of his four children died along the way and was left behind in a small unmarked grave. A few months after arriving in the nascent, chaotic city of San Francisco, his wife died of consumption. That woman, my grandmother, heroically endured the long, terrible months of travel, trudging onward for the sake of her remaining children, but her strength and courage were not enough to prolong her existence once they reached California, land of crude, opportunistic people. One day, during a violent fit of bloody coughing, her heart stopped.

Her widower, my grandfather, suddenly found himself alone with three children in an inhospitable city, and he understood that he could not care for them properly if he aimed to fulfill his dream of finding gold. He took the oldest son, who was twelve, with him into the hills, placed the second as an indentured servant, and left Molly, age four, at an orphanage founded by three Mexican nuns, with the promise that he would return for her as soon as he obtained the fortune he was after. That never happened.

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As a young girl, Molly was submissive and pious, seeming to delight in sacrifice and suffering. This is what Papo has told me anyway, but it is hard to imagine it seeing the warrior woman she is today, capable of leading street protests and, armed with her rolling pin, facing down any drunk, bandit, cop, or other scoundrel making trouble in our neighborhood. Little Molly spent so many hours on her knees, fasted with such fervor, and accepted the mockery of her peers with such resignation that she was dubbed "Saint Molly" by the other orphans. The two younger nuns, simple women, favored her over all the other girls, moved by the thought of a budding saint in their midst. At first, Mother Rosario, the leader of that tiny religious order, paid no attention to Molly's exaggerated devotion and the other nuns' desperate hopes; her pupils, all orphaned or abandoned girls, often displayed strange conduct. The mother superior was forced to intervene, however, when, at age eleven, young Molly began to have visions and hear voices. That was taking it a step too far. Mother Rosario felt that saintliness was fine for women of leisure but it had no place there, where a love of God was demonstrated through hard work. She believed there to be a very fine line between celestial communion and mental illness and so set about curing Molly's miracles through baths of cold water and geranium oil. She forced my mother to eat three meals daily, closely guarded to ensure she swallowed every bite and kept it down. She put her to work in the garden with a shovel and hoe, at the washing troughs and the bread oven, had her scrub the floor with bleach. Between the daily dishes of beans and rice and the sweat of hard work, the girl sailed through the difficult years of puberty with a certain normalcy, but she always maintained her inclination toward melodrama. Her father and brothers never returned for her or even sent news and so she eventually accepted that those three good sisters were her only family. She was now too busy to find creative ways of imitating the martyrs from the calendar of saints, but her religious fervor remained unwavering and at age fifteen she begged to be accepted as a novice.

And that is how Molly Walsh was blessed enough to don the rough white habit of the novice nuns. Her hair was shorn off like an inmate and she joined the small circle of women who had raised her, prepared to give herself over, body and soul, to charity. She would've preferred to enter a cloistered convent, some austere, medieval fortress made of icy stone where spiked belts were employed to punish the flesh, sleeping on the hard ground with a log for a pillow and fasting to the point of collapse. Instead, she had to make do with a more agreeable existence in the large adobe house of the orphanage, where the bunk beds had horsehair mattresses and the food was simple but plentiful. The mother superior, whose healthy appetite manifested in the contours of her hips and the rolls on her waist that her loose habit was unable to dissimulate, was of the belief that the body should be well nourished in order to better serve the Lord in strength and good health.