That night she was allowed to dance with whoever asked, and when Domingo walked over to her she thought her heart was going to leap right out through her mouth like a scared rabbit. They danced and danced, and even though she knew her father was fuming while keeping an eye on their every move and would reprimand her the next day, she took advantage of an occasion when she was no less than a princess holding court, and avoiding eye contact with all of her familia—but especially her father—she had the most memorable time of her life. As it should be for a debutante at her coming-out ball.

And that was that after that. Domingo courted her for the next three years and a week after her eighteenth birthday they eloped, because despite their three-year courtship her familia, not even la Chencha who almost always sided with her on everything, could not even see Domingo pintado, as the Spanish saying goes, and who, they said and never stopped saying, was just plain not good enough for their sweet Sofi.

“What are you thinking of, silly Sofi?” Domingo asked, breaking Sofi’s reflective mood, when he came in from a day of fruitless fishing.

“My mother, que en paz descanse, never did like you,” she said.

“I know,” he responded, still wondering where his wife’s thoughts were at at that moment when he had come in and found her sitting on the banco by the window, just staring outside at nothing.

“Neither did la Chencha … she still doesn’t.”

“I know that, too.”

“Neither did my dad.”

Domingo stared at Sofi and waited. He had come home last fall and Sofi and he in an unspoken way had picked up as husband and wife again as if only a day of estrangement had passed between them and not nearly twenty years. They acted like a couple who had actually been together for the better part of their nearly thirty-five-year marriage and had become so used to each other that they didn’t even notice one another no more, like an old chair in the corner of the room or a table passed on from one generation to the next that is just there for the purpose of eating off. They slept not only in separate beds but in separate rooms, and hardly shared a meal together.

Sometimes when Sofi wasn’t looking Domingo indulged himself in watching her, like when she ran around in fishing boots feeding the horses, or when she was squatting at work in her vegetable garden, or when she came home from the Carne Buena butcher shop, bloody apron and all, and what his reminiscing eyes saw was the radiant señorita whom he had made fall in love with him the night of her quinceañera.

“And don’t call me ‘silly Sofi’ no more neither.”