“Olga, I love your mother as much, if not more, than my actual sibling, but there’s a reason that I never had kids. Mothering and birthing a child are not the same. Children don’t ask to be born. They don’t owe anybody anything. This is one area your mother and I never saw eye to eye on, frankly. I’m down for her cause—no American can be truly free while we still have colonies. If your rights are less because you’re born in one place, not another, how meaningful are those rights in the first place? But, and this is a big but, that’s why you should talk to this Richard dude, not because you owe your mother anything. If you’ve got a good thing going on and this business opens a whole can of worms … Well, all I’m saying is, it’s okay to choose yourself. This is, I assure you, what I’d do. And it’s certainly what your mother would do.”
Olga thought about Matteo. How for the first time, really ever, she had been consciously imagining a future with someone. How good it had felt to begin to really let someone in. How she felt the constriction in her chest that she’d held for years begin to release. How different the whole thing had been from whatever it was she’d had with Dick, which she’d let drag on for far too long. Dick. She sighed. The world felt so heavy again.
“Did you hear her say that she was proud of me?” Olga asked.
“I did. It was a bold thing you did. Radical, as we used to say in the old days.”
It had felt good, that approval, something she’d previously thought only her brother could earn.
“Karen?” Olga asked. “My brother. I think she’s—”
Karen sucked her teeth. “Olga, your brother is a sorry-ass sellout. Hell, I’m … ‘furious’ is not the word. And PROMESA is just the tip of the damn iceberg. When he canceled the hearing this summer, well, that raised some eyebrows with your mother and some of her … supporters. They did some digging; he’s been on the take from the Selby brothers for years.”
“What?” Olga asked, incredulous. “What do you mean? For money?”
“What else could it be? They have a big stake in the debt down in P.R., have been buying up land. But it goes back longer than that. They looked at his votes from when he was on the City Council. Every fucked-up thing that’s happened to this city over the past fifteen, twenty years—the luxury developments displacing normal, working people, the retail and grocery stores only the 1 percent can afford to patronize, all of it—if the Selbys had a hand in it, which they almost always did, your brother voted to pave the way for them.”
Olga did not want to believe it, but her aunt’s words sparked a recollection. How upset her brother had been when Olga had mentioned Nick Selby. How vigorously he protested the notion that he and the Selbys were friends. A wave of nausea overtook her.
She looked out her windows at her beloved Fort Greene, the landscape now spiked with luxury high-rises, many of which the Selbys built after the City Council had voted to rezone the area for the stadium. She thought about Bush Terminal, the bars creeping up Fifth Avenue. She thought about the small businesses lost after the recession, after Sandy, their retail corpses replaced by hotels and big box stores. The creep of wealth and whiteness that had slowly, steadily been frog boiling her hometown, pushing out and scattering families like her own.
“The most painful wounds,” Papi used to say, “are those inflicted by our own kind.” He was, she realized now, absolutely right.
* * *
BY THE TIME Olga met Matteo for dinner that evening she was quite drunk. After her aunt had gone, Olga poured herself a large glass of vodka and did not stop drinking until she could stop her body from shaking. She could not bring herself to tell him about the visit, she could not imagine articulating her mother’s request. He could see that she was upset and tried to comfort her, to dig into whatever ill was plaguing her. His niceness and kindness enraged her. She bit into him every chance she could, gnawing on anything and everything that came out of his mouth as viciously as possible. When he walked her home and said perhaps they should spend the night apart, she was pleased. She was alone. As she deserved to be.
TODOPODEROSA
He hadn’t thought that he would cry, but as soon as he saw her, the tears blinded him. Thick, wet, large drops. He could hardly step closer; words choked in his throat. It was just that he couldn’t believe how small she was. No more than five-foot-one or -two, thin as a wisp. When he’d seen her last, he’d been just shy of seventeen. He was scrawny and knock-kneed, just starting his last big growth spurt. He remembered hugging her good-bye before the trip from which she never returned. He had just passed her in height, and when he’d wrapped his skinny arms around her slight shoulders, she’d commented on how tall he was getting. Over the years, she had grown to a presence bigger than any physical body, looming large over the choices he made with his life each step of the way. Now, he stood before her, forty-five and broad-shouldered, easily half a foot taller than the last time he saw her, and he was shocked by the power of such a tiny wight.