Perhaps la doña Jovita had beat her to it, after all, doña Felicia thought regretfully—lighting up the cigar Dr. Tolentino had just offered her—in giving el Doctor Tolentino a bit of special Rio Abajo medicine that he just couldn’t have gotten nowhere else.

15

La Loca Santa Returns to the World via Albuquerque Before Her Transcendental Departure; and a Few Random Political Remarks from the Highly Opinionated Narrator

That year, Holy Friday was unlike all others for both La Loca and her mom for it was the only occasion in Loca’s life—except at the age of three when she was taken to a hospital in Albuquerque and her death diagnosis was reevaluated as epilepsy—that Loca went out into the world.

For her debut, Loca wore the boycott jeans (upon Sofi’s insistence, washed) that were now being held up by a pair of her father’s suspenders left behind on a hanger in his ropero. Loca always rode barefoot with her soles thicker than moccasins and she had never owned a pair of boots, but for the occasion (and so that she wouldn’t look like a motherless lamb, un penco, her mom called her), Sofi insisted that she put on a pair of her own Ropers.

That same day, Rubén, Esperanza’s ex, perhaps not too discreetly but well intentioned, brought over a chenille blue bathrobe that Esperanza had left at his place back during their sweat lodge days, and Loca immediately made that item her own and put it on, too.

Rubén, like others who had been close to Esperanza in life, had been having the sometimes unsettling feeling of being even closer to her after her passing. For his own part, it would not have occurred to him on his own to look behind the door in his bedroom where, on the hook beneath two flannel shirts, a pair of dirty jeans, some “lady’s” nightgown (which had not belonged to Esperanza, by the way), and a pair of boxer shorts, was the chenille bathrobe.

He woke up that morning just before dawn and did that not really knowing why. When he found the blue bathrobe, he took it with him to the kitchen and laid it on a chair while he put some wood inside the wood-burning stove and got the coffee on. Then, just like that guy in that song by Rubén Blades (one of our Rubén’s pop culture heroes), he had the unfortunate experience of stepping barefoot in dog pee on the way to the bathroom.