Then, nobody, not even the priest at Mass, had been able to explain how Caridad had recovered from the massive injuries she suffered from that horrible attack. Bueno, gracias a Dios, nomás. But just when everybody was getting over that shock, Caridad, who had become known as kind of a, well, puta, went off to doña Felicia to become a curandera!

Well, maybe all that had some sense to it, after all. Since God’s hand was definitely involved in Caridad’s recovery, it must’ve been for a reason. In any case, ever since she came back from living in a cave, there was something really changed about her. You couldn’t put your finger on it except to say that men were now the last thing on Caridad’s mind … and that really was a milagro, the comadre thought.

The other one, la Gritona—who worked at the bank and was always wearing those little belted dresses with the big bows tied at the collar and always had on pumps that matched the exact color of the dress, with the shoes always the same, two-and-a-half-inch heels, plain—was dying to get married. She couldn’t stand that she had been dumped practically at the altar and that she had become the brunt of every joke made by all her Anglo friends at the bank. She’d probably get married with the first you-know-what who would let himself be caught.

And regarding all these unkind reflections that the comadre was having that night while she was sitting in Sofi’s kitchen waiting for her to make her very surprising announcement, in a few months she would be satisfied to find that her hunch about Fe was right: indeed Fe would marry a you-know-what, or more precisely, Casimiro, her myopic cousin.

Casimiro de Nambe was no longer of Nambe (although still Fe’s cousin), since he had been raised in Phoenix because his father had moved the family there years ago to start a cement business. Or was it making swimming pools for the ricos?

In any case, the family broke away from a two-hundred-and-fifty-year tradition of sheepherding. But in la comadre’s mind, once a sheepherder, always a sheepherder, and although Casimiro, Jr., had gone to the university there in Arizona and got his degree in accounting (the first in his family to ever go to college), he still looked like a sheepherder from northern New Mexico: thin, small, with thick black eyebrows and mustache, wearing tight denims, a big cattleman hat, and snakeskin Tony Lama botas. ¡Hijo! What a show-off.

Sofi poured the comadre a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove. With Domingo back, there was coffee made all hours of the day; it was his only addiction, he said. He had to have a cup in his hand all the time—half a cup, grounds, cold, no matter even when he was going to bed.