Chapters (24)
For a whole minute Domingo and Sofi stared at each other. It was the first time that they had looked directly at each other since his return. Then Domingo lowered his eyes again and suddenly with three quick steps he was at Sofi’s feet, his head on her lap, “I’m so sorry, Sofia. Perdoname, honey, for all the grief I’ve caused you.”
For a moment Sofi softened, but a man’s remorse must translate into a little more than a few tears and an apology on weak knees, even one whose mustache and smoldering eyes were crowned with Omar Sharif eyebrows. (Since once Sofi got to see what the gangly Frank Sinatra looked like she decided her querido looked more like what the singer should look like than what he actually did; and later, once she got to go to the movies, Sofi decided he had more of a Rudy Valentino–Omar Sharif–Prince of the Desert look about him.) But still made the pelitos on her arms rise a bit, so she only made a half-earnest gesture of moving away from him, although not quite pushing him away.
He looked up at her, the sky streaked purple and red, the last of the day’s sun wiping Domingo’s tear-stained cheeks, and the twenty years of separation between the two lovers dissolved. “Take me to the baile,” Sofi told him, with that same demanding haughtiness she had shown him the night of her quinceañera.
So it was that on the evening of August fourteenth, leaving Loca under the supervision of la Fe, Sofi, in the only party dress she had bought for herself ever in her life, since she made all her clothes, a kind of dark green to match her eyes, went out to two-step to the famous fiddle of Cleofes Ortíz at the Our Lady of Belen Fiesta with her one and only honey, who was still, in her estimation, as enrapturing as when her father kept him from taking her out to dance at the feast day baile of Santa Flora de Cordova in Belen when she was fourteen years old and known to the world as la niña.