Sofi screamed and called out “Ave Maria Purisimas,” and finally her three other precious children came running in. “Mom, Mom, what happened?” And then, everyone was screaming and moaning because the baby had stopped moving, lay perfectly still, and they knew she was dead.

It was the saddest velorio in Tome in years because it was so sad to bury a child. Fortunately none had died since—well, if memory served right, doña Dolores’s last son. Poor woman. Eleven children and one after the other passed on her until she was left with no one, except for her drunken foul-mouthed husband. It seems all the babies were victims of a rare bone disease they inherited through the father’s bloodline. What terrible misfortune for doña Dolores, suffering the pangs of labor through eleven births, all fated to die during infancy. Twelve years of marriage, eleven babies that did not survive, and to top it off, the husband drank up everything they owned.

A sad, sad story.

The day after the wake the neighbors all came out to accompany Sofi and the girls to the church at Tome, where Sofi wanted the little baby’s Mass to be held before they lay her into the cold ground. Everyone Sofi knew was there: the baby’s godparents, all of Sofi’s comadres and compadres, her sister from Phoenix, everyone except, of course, the baby’s father, since no one had seen hide nor hair of him since he’d left Sofi and the girls.

That marriage had a black ribbon on its door from the beginning. Sofi’s grandfather had refused to give the young lovers his blessing, the father had forbidden Sofi’s querido to step foot in their house during their three-year courtship, and the local parish priest joined the opposition when he refused to marry the couple in church.

Nobody believed that Domingo was good enough for little Sofi, not her sister, not her mother, not even her favorite teacher in high school, la Miss Hill, who had nothing but praise for Sofi’s common sense and intelligence. Nobody thought el Domingo would make a good husband because of the fact that he liked to gamble.

Gambling was in the man’s blood. And gambling is what Sofi did when she ran off with him, sheltered by the dark night of a new moon, and came back a señora. And then, nobody could say nothing about it but wait for the inevitable failure of Sofi’s marriage.

A month after he left, Sofi heard from her husband, a letter from El Paso with five ten-dollar bills and a promise to send more whenever he could. No return address. And no more news from Domingo ever again after that. After a year, Sofia was so mad, she forbade anyone to even mention his name in her presence.