“Yeah? Easy for you to say, My Mom the Mayor! __ since you be __ the may __ of Tome, __ like your daughter’s fut__, aren’t __ impor __ to you no more!”

“Watch how you talk to your mom,” don Domingo interjected, only to get a dirty look from Fe.

“That’s not true,” Sofi told Fe. “It’s only that I care more about you than about no career! Look at you! Look how upset you are over all this! And what’s that you keep popping into your mouth, anyway?”

“Rolaids,” Fe said. “For my _____.”

“She takes them for indigestion all the time, tía, like candy,” Casey told Sofia, seizing the opportunity to perhaps make his aunt an ally in this mysterious struggle he was having with Fe and her loyalty to Acme International. Something was definitely not right with his Fe no more, as much as it broke his heart to admit it. Sofia and he exchanged glances.

Casey thought for a moment he heard something swoosh a little over by the window, like the kind of sneaky movements a resident mouse makes, and then realized, seeing not a mouse but Loca’s bare feet sticking out from beneath the drapes, that she was keeping out of sight but making sure she was in earshot range.

“Tomorrow morning you are taking Fe to the hospital for a full checkup and then we are going to see a lawyer!” Sofia told Casey.

And that’s what they did.

And that is when they found out that Fe had cancer. She had cancer on the outside and all over the inside and there was no stopping it by then. But what they also found out was that before she started at Acme International, she already had skin cancer. And because she already had melanoma, what they found out from the lawyer they retained was that she would not be able to sue Acme International for the other cancer she had undoubtedly gotten from her chemical joyride at Acme International, which was eating her insides like acid and which no amount of Rolaids would have ever helped.

The rest of this story is hard to relate.

Because after Fe died, she did not resurrect as La Loca did at age three. She also did not return ectoplasmically like her tenacious earth-bound sister Esperanza. Very shortly after that first prognosis, Fe just died. And when someone dies that plain dead, it is hard to talk about.

Fe was given a Mass in Tome by Father Jerome who said her cremation was approved of by the Church (and paid for by Acme International) because at the time of her death there was so little left of Fe to be buried anyway.