The book's title story is told not by a character but by a third-person narrator who has access to its central character's thoughts and feelings and presents them in that character's inner language. Thus readers can observe Cleófilas through what other characters say about her (the women going to her wedding and Graciela), but also — and mainly — through her own thoughts and observations. What we learn is that she is a conventional young woman who possesses a certain depth of character that she herself discovers only when she is tested.
To begin with, Cleófilas seems rather shallow and unobservant. She knows how characters on soap operas dress and behave, but she agrees to marry a man she scarcely knows; Juan Pedro is a nonentity, but he lives and works across the border in Texas, he has a nice truck, and he has selected her as his bride, all of which makes him acceptable as a husband. She sees it all through a haze of telenovelas and romance novels; the creek, as she first crosses it, is "full of happily ever after." Only after she has married does she actually look at the man and begin to muse upon the fact that she has promised to spend her life with him.
