Sofi thought it was kind of weird but Fe did not recall any of the specifics that immediately followed receiving Tom’s Dear Juana letter. Fe thought she had only dreamt herself open-mouthed, eyes bulging, as if she had gotten trapped in that ghost mine her grandfather, Cresencio, used to tell her about when she was a child.

Her father Domingo’s father, abuelo Cresencio, was about ten years of age when he herded sheep for a rich family in Tome. One day he discovered an entrance to a mine shaft. He found a shovel, pickax, and other miner’s tools. He took off his red handkerchief from around his neck and placed it at the entrance, with a stone on top of it to mark the place because until that day to the boy’s knowledge nothing had been known of such mine shaft. That night little Cresencio reported it to don Toribio, whom he worked for, and the next day they both went to find the mine. But though they searched all around the area where he thought the mine entrance was, they found nothing.

“Juan Soldado is guarding the gold mine,” abuelo Cresencio would whisper to the girls. “Who’s Juan Soldado, ’buelo?” Esperanza spoke up, being the oldest and therefore not supposed to be afraid.

“Juan Soldado was a Spanish soldier and that was his gold mine. He was trapped in there, killed. ¡Ay, esos gachupines! They were really greedy. So even though Juan Soldado died he didn’t want no one to find his gold. So he has kept the entrance a mystery.

“Many, many people have seen it over the years, like I did, but when they go back with help, prepared to go in, it’s gone.”

Fe had gotten lost in the Juan Soldado gold mine of her head. In the darkness of that mine, she called to Tom, hearing only her own echo reverberating back, with never no reply from her beloved, who surely, she thought with great conviction, was also lost in there. She wove in and out of those moments in which she suspected that Tom was just as lost as she was, more so, maybe, because Tom, true love that he was, she never thought to be too smart.

At other times (and these were the most unbearable) Tom did not even exist, had probably never existed, and in fact, was probably local folklore, like Juan Soldado. And in what we may rightly call her darkest moments, like Juan Soldado, fiercely protecting the discovery of his gold mine, Fe suspected that Tom had purposely made the path to his miserly heart disappear so that she would never find it again.