Olga Dies Dreaming(11)
“Tsk, tsk.” Prieto sucked his teeth. “It’s not nonsense if it involves my sister.”
“My bad. I didn’t mean that as a diss, sir, I just don’t get it,” Alex continued. “I’ve hung out with Olga. I mean, the work she did on your last campaign. She’s smarter than ninety percent of the people I know working in Washington—”
“And Olga would say that’s why she’s not one of them.”
“Touché.”
“That’s a direct quote, by the way. She’s literally said that shit to me before. Listen, Alex, my sister built this business from the ground up, all by herself. She makes a nice living. She’s very generous to my kid, our family. If this wedding shit makes her happy, what kind of East Coast elites are we to question it?”
Prieto was protective of his sister. When their mother had left, Olga was still in middle school, just a year or so older than his daughter was now. He’d been charged with watching out for her, and he took that charge seriously. Over the years, though, at times the roles felt reversed. Alex was right, his sister was smarter than most people he knew, and not just in D.C. Prieto always had to work hard at school, but Olga barely had to crack a book. And she’d been a good artist, too. Beautiful photographer. But the thing that his sister had that most impressed him was her street smarts. That, he knew, she got from their grandmother. Prieto could make people feel good when he was talking to them, but nobody could anticipate a problem or solve it faster than Olga. Indeed, he sometimes resented her ability to wriggle out of trouble just by dialing up the charm at precisely the right moment in exactly the right way. But it was this same skill that had also made her Prieto’s most trusted consigliere. She was only a college student when he ran for his first office, but she had helped write every press release and campaign speech. When he and Lourdes’s mother split, it was his sister who helped him rebuild his life. Once he got to Congress, it was Olga who coached him on speaking to donors. On how to say yes to things without really committing to much. Whenever he got into a bind—personal, professional, political—his sister was always his first call. Almost always.
For these reasons, Prieto was both befuddled by and defensive of his sister’s career. To Prieto, his sister could be or do anything: fix the MTA, run the Met Museum, replace snarky fucking Alex as his chief of staff. He was unclear why, therefore, she chose to tie her life and fortune to the minutiae of other people’s personal lives. It felt too small an arena for her talents and, invariably, their lives encroached upon hers. Her clients called her any day of the week, any hour of the day. And he knew these people. They were the same kinds of people he had to spend time with when reelection season rolled around, courting donations. They were nice people, generally, but their litany of problems, real or imagined, never waned. Nor did their sense of urgency around getting these problems resolved, their allergy to even a moment’s discomfort quite severe. Still, Prieto made certain to keep these opinions to himself. His mother, in her letters to him, had made clear her disappointments with Olga’s career. A betrayal of their family “legacy.” He knew she had made this clear to Olga as well. Prieto felt no need to pile on. Instead, he tried, both publicly and privately, to champion her successes as a business owner and encourage her, in any way, to broaden her options. To ask for more.
The segment today was short. Etiquette in the digital age. Very helpful stuff, actually. He was proud of her. Of them both. Not bad for two kids from Sunset Park.
“She’s great, isn’t she?” Prieto said to no one in particular. “Honestly, she’s better than these hosts. They could replace Tammy or Toni with her today and I bet their ratings would go through the roof, having a Latina anchoring a show like this!”
He picked up his phone to text Olga, and he could feel Alex staring at him.
“Congressman, can I put the real news back on?”
“Psssh,” he said, “you’ve got to lighten up, Alex. But yeah. And before I forget, what’s going on with that Salvadorean couple from Fortieth Street that ICE picked up?”
“We’re working on it. Not a lot of info. The pressing thing this morning is down in P.R.”
“Shoot.”
“There’s been more protests at University of Puerto Rico. They’ve been tear-gassing the students and—”
“What? Why hasn’t this been in the news?”
“It was in El Diario; you know that national media isn’t interested in P.R. Anyway, it all has to do with—”
“I know. PROMESA. Fuck.”
“Well, they finally got a new university president in place, but the PROMESA board is digging their heels in on those budget cuts, and the school can’t operate on their allocation.”
He’d rather be getting yelled at by the viejita at the train station. After a slate of federal tax breaks expired, corporations slowly fled Puerto Rico, causing the colony’s income to fall, debt to rise, and infrastructure to fall apart. Recently, the seemingly abstract issue of Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis had turned into a professional and personal nightmare for Prieto. Professionally, because his vote for PROMESA—which put in place a politically appointed control board to restructure the island’s debt—had completely backfired. In the year since Obama made it law, the austerity imposed had sunk the colony into worse shape than ever. Personally, because everyone from his mother to the lady who did his dry cleaning was pissed off at him about it. The former more seriously than the latter. This PROMESA vote haunted him.