“Since our last daughter’s baptism … a year and a half before you disappeared on us. And since that child out there died there hasn’t been one evening when I have been away from this house! Even the night that Caridad was attacked by the malogra and I could barely tear myself away from her at the hospital, so worried was I that she wouldn’t make it through the night, I forced myself back home—just as worried for the two daughters I had left here who were as helpless as two babies—and for good reason too! That poor thing out there”—she pointed toward the window where Loca at that moment was out by the ditch—“had somehow got herself hiding in the stove!

“Look at me, Domingo! While you were gone, doing who knows what—gambling your soul away, dancing with every loose … woman you ran across, and who knows what else—I have been hanging the rumps of pigs and lambs and getting arthritis from the freezer and praying to God to give me the strength to do the best by my girls alone and with the wits I had left after what I’d been through with them, starting from when Loca died!”

“Loca’s not dead,” Domingo protested, although just barely daring to speak up, since he knew this was not a good time to assert his own observations or opinion of things and it was best for him to just listen if he was ever going to win la Sofi back at all. Strangely enough, with the hunch of the gambler, he was getting this tingling feeling all over that told him that his honey was just about to come around again.

“Well, she was! ¡Chingao!” Sofi stood up, her body trembling with the rage of twenty years of celibate living. Had she been able to have a lover, she would not have hesitated a year after that son of a gun had taken off without the decency of even letting her know that he was all right, but that was when Loca had died and “come back” and after that people really couldn’t come to visit because of Loca’s “condition.” As Sofi had just told Domingo, she herself could not go out at night and leave her little girl, even though Esperanza after a while was old enough to babysit.

The fact that Loca never let no one near her but her mother made it impossible for Sofi to feel comfortable leaving her alone, except to go to work during the day, with the number of the butcher shop right by the phone at home and Sofi just a ten-minute drive away. So, needing to earn a living for her family, she took the risk of being away for eight hours a day, six days a week.