The final five chapters of Mango Street offer a marriage, a death, three witches and a wish, a friendship, and a satisfying yet subtle resolution for Esperanza. We hear no more of the attack made upon her. Has she told anyone of it: her mother, for example? Perhaps not, for throughout the book — except in "The Red Clowns" — she has been somewhat secretive, something of a stoic, keeping her feelings and conflicts within herself, letting even the reader see only hints. She may have told Alicia, for Alicia seems now to be her confidante. Almost certainly she will not have told Sally, for to Esperanza that experience, which she did not want to talk about or remember in the first place, is something to be confided — if at all — only to a truly best friend, and it is now clear to Esperanza that Sally is not her real friend.
Still Sally is a "friend," in the same sense that Cathy (Queen of Cats) was a friend very early in the book. Part of Esperanza's stoicism is that she seems to accept people for what they are, knowing they will not change in radical ways; as she has said several times of her sister, "That's how she is." So Esperanza goes to visit Sally, now probably approaching her fourteenth birthday, in the home Sally shares with her new husband, where she is kept a virtual prisoner by this "marshmallow salesman" with a violent temper. Esperanza says she knew this would happen; now it has happened and there is nothing to be done about it. Esperanza tells this in a flat, unemotional tone. She knows Sally is not "in love" but was only governed by a need to escape her unbearable life.
