Yes, Maria saw in that fly’s eyes a time when she would surely need a warning most.

9

Sofia, Who Would Never Again Let Her Husband Have the Last Word, Announces to the Amazement of Her Familia and Vecinos Her Decision to Run for la Mayor of Tome

It was exactly two days after her fifty-third birthday, while Sofi was putting another load into the washer out in the enclosed back porch, shooing away the moscas and saying to herself things like, “If that Domingo doesn’t fix the screen door this week, I’m gonna have to do it myself; then I’ll throw his butt out for sure; what do I want him for then anyhow?” and things like that, just before the old wringer went out with a big shake and clank (not too surprising considering its age) and she said aloud, “God damn …!”, quickly pulling out her scapular from inside her white blouse and kissing it to heaven, that she decided she was going to run for la mayor of Tome and make some changes around there …

She called up her comadre, the one who lived down the road, with the ten good acres of bean and chile crops, and asked her to come over. She had big news, she said.

Her comadre, meanwhile, thought that Sofi had called to ask for her Singer back and she didn’t want to tell Sofi that after she got her dress for the fiesta at Our Lady of Belen made, she had decided to do her ’jita’s new baby’s baptismal dress and the silver metallic thread got jammed up somewhere in all that spooling and, well, something happened to the machine, so it wasn’t working no more.

The comadre (whose name it is best not to reveal here for this reason as well as some others that we shall soon see) had been after her husband about it. He was pretty good at fixing things, mostly things that were big and wide and not very complicated, like the roof or a viga fence, but he sometimes got something to work again in the house. God knows everything they owned had had its day already, so his efforts came in handy, but truthfully, he was no real handyman. Of course, she could take the old Singer, which as far as she could tell had had its day too, to a repair shop in Albuquerque, but all that meant money that they just wouldn’t have until after they were able to harvest the beans and chile.