Instead, as she watched Loca from the window going down to the acequia where she laid her fiddle down and sat against the cottonwood just staring out at nothing, Sofi took notice that her daughter was losing weight because her jeans were really getting baggy at the butt (baggier than usual since she hardly had a butt to begin with), and that the label in the back had been deliberately cut out, leaving an indecent tear.

There was so much Sofi did not know about the whys of Loca, despite the fact that since the age of three when she had died and been “resurrected” at her funeral Mass, Loca had never left home and her mother was the sole person whom she ever let get near her. Loca went only as far as the stalls and riding the horses along the acequia and walking down to the acequia on foot. That was it.

She had never been to school. She had never been to a dance. She never went to Mass. (At first this, above all, had concerned Sofi due to pressure from el Father Jerome, but no coaxing, no threats about punishment neither here nor in the afterlife bothered Loca, who, when the priest told her on the phone that if she did not honor the Lord’s day in His Home she would surely burn in hell, said, “I’ve already been there.” And then, much to Sofi’s embarrassment, certainly having learned this expression from that other malcriada daughter Esperanza, Loca added, “And actually, it’s overrated”.)

She did not take her First Holy Communion as each sister in her turn did, nor the Holy Sacrament of Confirmation. Not because Father Jerome would not have accommodated Loca’s particular affliction by offering some form of private instruction but because Loca had flatly refused it. Loca would have been walking a very thin line to getting excommunicated herself, insisting that she could tell Father Jerome a thing or two about the wishes of God, but Father Jerome took pity on her and finally dismissed Loca as a person who was really not responsible for her mind.

To her sisters, the saddest part of all was that Loca had never had a social life. Her limber horse-riding body had never so much as felt the inside of a dress, much less of a bra! No, Loca had done none of the things young ladies did or at least desired to do.

She had become proficient in cooking and sewing but only to help her mother and sisters at home. She was the caretaker of the animals and had done excellent training with the horses since she was barely five or six years old.

And though no one had given her a single lesson, and surely no one in that household could even carry a tune, nobody played the fiddle like Loca—the very one that had belonged to her abuelo and which she found as a child in her mother’s armoire.