Sofi sighed wistfully because she herself had not been taken out for close to a quarter of a century. The years, they did pass quickly, she reflected without admitting nothing about her long sparse social life out loud. She handed her forty-year-old sewing machine to her vecina, explaining its quirks, and then put various hilos into a paper sack for her as well, since the woman hadn’t quite decided on the color of her dress for the dance.

“Out of the blue, the man tells me, ‘Saturday there’s a baile in Belen at Our Lady of Belen Church’!” the neighbor continued, laughing and elbowing Sofi, who only listened, remembering her teen years when she was courted by the handsomest man she had ever laid her betraying eyes on. “‘What say we go, honey?’ he says to me. And I just looked at him and tried to smell his breath, thinking maybe he had taken to the bottle again. Since it has been mucho tiempo since we went dancing, you know what I mean, comadre? Yes, he waltzed with me at our son’s boda and at our grandson’s baptism he got up and two-stepped with me and our daughter-in-law a few times, but it’s not the same thing as saying, ‘let’s go and kick up some dust’! Is it, comadre? That just leaves me ’ora ora with four days to make myself a dress! So I’d better get going!”

Well, Sofi’s vecina from down the road was like a novia all over again, eyes gleaming, rushing out with a little swish of the hips leaving Sofi to her memories of when she was like that a lifetime ago, always happy and over nothing. When she was a young girl there didn’t seem to be nothing that could dismay her. She had one of those personalities that ingratiated people around her, sweet like Caridad’s but without the melancholy absentmindedness that was particular to that daughter.

And then one day when she was still in high school, she met a young man who was miel in the flesh, and after that, only when she was with him was she able to smile. How it bugged the you-know-what out of her family, who said there was just no living with her no more after she got together with Domingo; “ese tirili,” her grandfather called him with obvious disdain for her dandy lover.

Domingo was an actor, so he said. (Well, he did do a lot of acting, even if it wasn’t on stage. And no matter how many times he did it, Sofi always felt a little rush whenever he’d lean over and whisper, “Frankly, my dear …”