Olga Dies Dreaming(95)
“So, um, when do I get to meet with ‘Leadership’?” he asked.
“Actually, now.” And so, Prieto followed Tirso into the main building, down a corridor and to a closed wooden door, goose bumps forming on his arms, despite the oppressive heat.
THE CALL
For nearly two weeks, Olga had been trying to give Chef José Andrés $9,999 to help with the makeshift kitchens he had set up to feed Puerto Rico in Maria’s aftermath. If videos of the hurricane’s devastation had been her tragedy porn, their antidote were the clips of the dynamic chef making meals for thousands under impossible conditions. She searched social media for them, each one eliciting cathartic tears. The issue with the gift was, of course, that it was in the form of a duffel bag of cash, adding a layer of logistical difficulty to her philanthropic inclination. She tried to send it down with her brother on his last trip, but when he realized that she didn’t want him to pass along a check, but actual cash, he balked.
“Why do you have this much cash?” he asked.
“My client’s in a cash-based business and pays me accordingly.”
“?Loca! Just deposit it and make an online donation like everybody else!”
She didn’t bother making an excuse, instead resorting to guilt. “Why do you have to make everything so difficult? I do so much for you; why can’t you do this for me?”
“I don’t even think this is legal! He won’t be able to accept this.”
“I purposefully made it under ten K to keep it aboveboard. If you get it to him, he’ll figure out how to put it to use. He’s a hospitality person; we figure shit out.”
Still, he refused. She had thought about going down herself but felt paralyzed to book a ticket. Though she knew it was important work, helpful work, something about swooping in and handing out supplies like she had seen all the white relief workers do on TV made her grimace. Not the labor of it—she was not a person afraid of hard work—but the feeling of it. It made her feel American in the worst possible way: dropping in and out of your own comfort, doing work of limited skill, then patting yourself on the back for it. Or worse, feeling pity for a people to whom she was connected. Furthermore, she had not heard from her mother, directly or otherwise, since the encounter with Reggie, and Olga felt somehow that the island was her mother’s place. She should not go without an invitation.
For related reasons, Olga had been steering clear of Reggie King. However, she recognized now that he could easily resolve her charitable dilemma. Since the storm, Reggie had been going back and forth on his own plane—with supplies, with the media, with musical artists—and, as she suspected, he listened to her objective with little question or concern, saying only that he would send Clyde to get the bag. This disappointed Olga only in that she was sorry to hear Clyde had not yet gone back to school. So, when she heard the knock on her door, she quickly ran through her planned script to gently scold him.
But it was not Clyde. It was her aunt Karen, flanked by two escorts, their faces covered by black bandanas. The sight pulled the breath from Olga’s mouth. Before she could say a word, they had pushed past her and were, as Karen explained, doing a sweep for “bugs.” Her brother had told her wild things about her mother that Reggie only amplified and colored in, yet these stories failed to prepare her for the terrifying and surreal sensation of the Pa?uelos Negros invading her apartment. Of seeing that it was all true. Of knowing that if they were here it was only because her mother had sent them.
“Okay,” Aunt Karen declared when the place was deemed secure, “if we are all clear, you can wait downstairs now, okay?”
Karen had spent most of her life in front of a classroom, and her professorial delivery reared its head even in moments such as now. Her casual demeanor made Olga herself relax, take her aunt in. Olga had not seen her in nearly a decade, since shortly after her grandmother died. Karen had aged, but not nearly as much as Olga would have thought. She had always found her aunt beautiful, and she was still so now. Olga imagined that Karen and her mother must have been quite the pair when they were young.
“Olga,” her aunt offered with warmth, “you are glowing. Are you in love?”
Olga’s mother had never believed in witchcraft, but her grandmother had, and she had always felt—with some degree of fear and reservation—that La Karen, as she called her, had a bruja’s touch. Olga felt herself blushing but unable to speak.
“You reveal yourself, girl!” Karen sighed with a smile as she made her way to the sofa. Olga felt her eyeing the apartment. Judging. Taking in the accoutrements of bourgeoisie that Olga had, at one point, been so proud of having accrued, and now felt embarrassed of. Olga and Prieto had grown up with Karen in their lives, but the relationship belonged, first and foremost, to their mother, who had, according to their grandmother, worshiped at Karen’s altar when they were in high school. Karen: the first person their mother had ever connected with utterly independent of her siblings or her family or her neighborhood. Theirs had been a closeness that nothing rivaled—not their mother’s relationship with her children, and certainly not with their father. Olga’s mother had once said that in her life only Karen had never disappointed her; only Karen lived a life as big as she was. To Olga, this was as close to having her mother near as she might ever get.