And what brought her to send Domingo out of her life once again was the day she realized he had given up the deed to the house. He couldn’t give up the butcher shop (which he probably would have, given the chance), because she had sold it already in shares to the community and it no longer belonged just to Sofi.

But the house, that home of mud and straw and stucco and in some places brick—which had been her mother’s and father’s and her grandparents’, for that matter, and in which she and her sister had been born and raised—that house had belonged to her. The law, however, based on “community property,” stated that the house also belonged to her legal husband who remained, even after twenty years of being la Abandonada, Domingo.

One day, that very same woman, who, not just a few vecinos whispered, should never have let that so-and-so and such-and-such come back to begin with, was notified by the bank that her home, along with one measly acre next to her property which she had not given up to the Tome collective so as to keep Loca’s horses, was being transferred over to a certain Judge Julano.

Immediately Sofia knew what had happened and found it, well, let’s just say it, plain dishonest that Domingo lost such a bet to a judge, a servant of the people, for heaven’s sake! Sofia was not going to take it lying down, neither. So she got up one morning and went down to see the peacock raiser, who, among other things, was a lawyer by profession. Since he had turned out to be a good vecino, Sofi didn’t really think of him as no lawyer but more like gente, so she felt she could trust him, and through his efforts she finally got the judge to return her calls.

Yes, indeed, Judge Julano had won the house at a cockfight “fair and square,” the judge told Sofi in that way that legal-type people always talk to people who are not, giving off that feeling that they got the law on their side, whether or not they do.

“But how can it be fair and square, when those gallo fights are illegal!” Sofi cried in exasperation.

“Well, señora, lo siento muncho,” the juez apologized like the big hypocrite that he was. “But it’s no less fair than not putting your husband and the rest of those guys running that operation in jail, now is it?”