MISSION — It only takes an instant for a life to change forever.

Griselda Peña knows that all too well.

One minute, she was feeding her cats, cooking breakfast for her family and quietly grinning over the good news she received that morning — she was pregnant with her fourth child.

But less than six hours later, an electrical fire burned the 35-year-old Mission resident’s home, leaving her family with only the clothes on its backs.

Suddenly, the thought of welcoming another baby into the world filled her with panic, instead of joy.

“How can you raise a new baby with nothing?” she said in Spanish, remembering the October fire. “It’s too much.” (Watch "The Vazquez-Peña Family," a Monitor multimedia presentation)

Now Peña — still pregnant — her husband and three children are temporarily living in an unfinished mobile home as they try to rebuild what they once had. With no prior construction experience and little money to spend, however, the work is slow going.

Every Sunday they use their only day off to work on a new house in hopes of completing it in time to welcome their newest member home in June.

“With hard work and a little help from God, I think we can get back up on our feet,” she said. “We are working to get back. We have to get up.”

‘ALL OF THE BEAUTIFUL MEMORIES’

Even before the electrical fire two months ago, the Peña household could at best be described as austere. But it was home.

Peña and her husband, Martin Vazquez, still remember the day in 2004 that they gave a down payment on a piece of land in a colonia northwest of Alton and immediately moved their modest trailer house onto the property.

“I liked being there,” she said. “And the most important thing was that we were all there together.”

As years passed, each member of the family left their own mark on the Astrid Street residence.

Peña’s oldest son — Jose, 16 — would sit for hours in the bedroom he shared with his younger siblings — strumming chords on his guitar, practicing scales on his trumpet, filling the home’s rooms with lilting music.

Laura, 13, used to lie on the floor, idly playing with the family’s four cats and chatting about everything from school to dance practice.

Photos of their half brother, 4-year-old Martincito, plastered every inch of spare space — he mugged for cameras in his gaucho costume and as he drove his electric toy car.

Vazquez rarely spoke much, but spent his days doing odd jobs around the home and supporting the family with money earned from a one-man landscaping service.

As their fourth year in the home approached, he promised the children a large Christmas tree.

But flames tore that dream apart and incinerated everything they owned into a pile of melted plastic, ash and shattered glass.

“All of the beautiful memories of them — they all burned,” Peña said.

MELTED PLASTIC, SHATTERED GLASS

On Oct. 28, Peña woke up early. She hoped the family would have time to eat breakfast together before her husband and Jose left for work. As it turned out, it would be their last meal on Astrid Street.

With the men gone, and Laura spending the weekend with her godparents, Peña and Martincito departed for a day full of errands just after noon.

Within hours, Peña received a frantic phone call from a neighbor. Her house was on fire.

“I didn’t believe it,” she said. “I didn’t want to believe it.”

She rushed back to the neighborhood, arriving to see flames devouring her home.

Firefighters doused the blaze with gallons of water as friends, neighbors and even a television news crew gathered to watch the destruction of all for which her family had worked.

All Peña could think of was what was left inside — Jose’s guitar, photos of Laura and little Martin, the $600 her husband had told her to hide away for their land payment.

“Everything was destroyed,” she said. “Nothing remained.”

Neighbors offered to take the family into their homes, and for nearly a week they bounced from house to house — eventually settling in with Martincito’s godparents less than a mile away.

“Most of the families that offered to take us in have five or six children,” Peña said. “We felt better with them than with a large family.”

But even there, conditions are not ideal. The family sleeps on two mattresses stuffed in the corner of an unfinished mobile home.

Exposed wooden beams block their access to the doorway. The cats trip and tumble while creeping over a particle board floor.

Luckily, an unseasonably warm winter has kept the nights warm enough to live comfortably without heat.

There is no running water, though, so Peña must get up several times a night to use the restroom in the main house.

“It’s a very complicated routine,” she said. “But I don’t complain, because I don’t want to put the burden on my children.”

‘A TEST FROM GOD’

In the seven weeks since the fire, the family has started building a proper home.

They can only work on Sundays as their demanding work and school schedules keep them busy the other six days of the week.

But to everyone’s amazement, Vazquez has already completed the frame for the two-room structure using construction supplies donated by friends and neighbors.

“My husband didn’t know how to do it, but he does what he can,” she said. “I don’t know how he’s been able to do so much.”

Even with months of work left to go, she feels bad asking others for help. Knock on any door on their street, she said, and you’ll find a family in need of something.

In the white-frame home down the block, for example, an illegal immigrant struggles to feed his family of several children with no work and no access to government assistance. Yet somehow, each person is able to set aside their own problems to help.

“All of them have helped with something,” Peña said. “Even if it’s just a plank of wood.”

Still, the family needs more.

Martin Jr. has no winter clothes; Jose and Laura need a computer for their school work; and the family fears they will lose their property if they can’t start making payments on it again.

“Maybe this is all a test from God,” Peña said. “Something to show us how united we are and what we can do together.”

Jeremy Roebuck covers courts, law enforcement and general assignments for The Monitor. You can reach him at (956) 683-4437.