When Perla Reyes was six or seven, she visited family in the Dominican Republic with her older sister Ruth. The girls got up to some kind of mischief, and their grandmother chased them through the garden. “Perla tried to jump a fence, but she got caught and ended up stuck there, dangling from her underwear,” Ruth recalled. “My grandma couldn’t be mad anymore.”

The pattern held as the sisters grew. “I was the troublemaker,” Ruth said. “Sometimes I’d get frustrated because she was just so quiet and good.”

Perla enjoyed her job at a wholesale jewelry company, Ruth said, but her greatest joy was her 5-year-old daughter, Heilie. “She was a young mom, so Heilie really got to enjoy her,” Ruth said. “Her dream was to get away from the city so Heilie could have the same freedom she had.”

The family is now planning to move to Boston, where Heilie can be near her cousins.