Loca, far from being una inocente as some of her all too simpleminded neighbors assumed, among many other things was an expert horsewoman. She had trained all the horses since she was tall enough to climb up and ride on her own. Her favorite was a beautiful black-with-gray Arabian that she had helped its mother give light to, that was her best friend. She called it Gato Negro.

“Why the heck would you call a horse a cat?” don Domingo had asked her when he first heard Loca calling it over.

“I’m not calling Gato Negro a cat,” Loca said, lovingly stroking its salt-and-pepper mane while feeding it carrots.

“You named that horse Gato …” Domingo laughed, as exasperated by Loca as by the other strange and wondrous women in his home that he had missed for twenty years. He would never figure out how they all came to be that way.

“I named it Gato Negro. 1 never said it was a cat,” Loca said with that kind of precocious tone of hers that sometimes was charming and sometimes really grated on her familia’s ñervos. Her father gave up and walked off. Gato Negro was mostly black and had that fixed look of cats when they are readying for an attack or think they are going to be attacked and ready themselves. Calling it Gato Negro didn’t mean nothing more than that, obviously, because horses are not attack animals. Everyone knew that.

“Where’s Loca, Ma___?” Fe called as she came in on one of those hot afternoons when Loca was down by the ditch. On Wednesdays Fe got out work at the savings and loan at 3 P.M. and sometimes stopped by to see her mother, who was home on some days now that there were community volunteers at the shop.

Shortly after her “recovery” la Fe had moved out. She took a little apartment with a roommate, a gringa who also worked at the bank. Her mother had not wanted her to leave home just like that, because she was not quite her organized self after the blowout with her Tom, but Sofia understood that la Fe was trying very hard to learn something from it by becoming more independent, so she didn’t try to stop her third daughter from leaving.

Caridad left. Esperanza left. Then la Fe left, Fe’s departure being premeditated and uneventful. She simply had responded to a notice on the bulletin board in the employee’s lounge: NON-SMOKING FEMALE LOOKING FOR SAME IN ROOMMATE TO SHARE EXPENSES. WALKING DISTANCE FROM THE SAVINGS AND LOAN OF TOME. On the first of the month, Fe moved a few personal belongings into the two-bedroom apartment and she was settled.