“I always used to call you that and you liked it, don’t you remember?” he said, trying to get on her good side because he had a funny feeling that some long-held-off reproaches from the past decades were imminent.

The night he had shown up at the back door, she had come out of the girls’ room when Esperanza called to her, sizing him up and down, and she said dryly, “Did you forget something?” Then she went back to tend to the two daughters in crisis who had become women during his absence. He brought in his bag and made himself at home in the spare room in the back, and trying to be as innocuous as possible, spent the first days after his reappearance keeping out of everybody’s way.

Little by little Sofi started to talk to him, but she confined their verbal exchanges to things that pertained to the household. Yes, she had let him return, he was after all her husband and the father of their children, but he was sad to accept the reality that his presence was little more than tolerated.

“Do I look like a silly woman to you, Domingo?” she said, cocking her left eyebrow. EEE, Domingo thought, remembering her temper, at least he was getting some kind of response from her. “Not at all,” he said. “You look like a beautiful woman to me … especially right now, with the glow of the sunset against your face …” There was a time when Domingo had only to look at Sofi and she would go to him, dissolving in his embrace like liquid gold … a time when Domingo looked forward to every sunset with Sofia, his Sofi. But that was before the cockfights, the horses, the card games, the nickel-and-dime bets that turned into acres of land he bet away and knowing there was no end and no limit to his impulses, he went away for twenty years without looking back.

“I just ran into your comadre getting into her truck with your sewing machine …,” he started to say.

“She’s making a dress for the feast day dance at Belen,” Sofi told him, looking again out the window and wondering if Domingo still found the hazy hue of the falling sun as flattering to her profile as once upon a long time ago.

“So the compadre’s taking her out finally, huh?” he said, meaning to make Sofi smile, but she was not in the mood and looked at him again sternly.

“Do you know how long it’s been since I went to a fiesta, Domingo?” she asked. He shook his head and lowered his eyes like a boy who was about to be scolded, but he looked more pitiful because he was a man about to be scolded.