It was a hazy day as he made his way out of his house—his grandmother’s house, the home he’d grown up in—and over to the Thirty-sixth Street train station, his favorite to work. It had a local and an express, so it attracted more people, but mainly he liked it for sentimental reasons. This was the station his parents would post up at when they were selling Palante papers for the Young Lords. Unlike in the Latino enclaves of Manhattan, the Lords’ footprint in South Brooklyn was relatively small, so his parents stuck out. They were sort of local folk heroes. Or crazy Puerto Rican hippies, depending on who you asked. Either way, Prieto enjoyed imagining them out there, a generation before, connecting with the people of their community, and him, a generation later, carrying the mantle now. Or so he saw it on his good days.
The first forty-five minutes passed more or less as usual. Lots of handshakes. Some daps. A heated rap battle with one of his favorite younger voters. Prieto carrying several strollers down the staircase. （It’s really ridiculous, he thought, that we don’t have more accessible stations.） Then, an older lady with a grocery cart was struggling to get her things up the station steps, but when Prieto went to help her, she took one look at him and swatted him away.
“Thank you, pero, no thank you. With you helping me, I’m likely to end up with all my groceries in the street, starving to death.”
God bless the viejitas and their flair for the dramatic.
“Se?ora, let me just help you, and then you can tell me why I stink, okay?”
She acquiesced and allowed him to take the cart but did not wait for him to get to the top of the stairs before she began running through her litany of offenses.
“First of all, you let them build that … mall, pero where are the jobs? Why does my grandson still have no job? Next, mis vecinos. Nice people. From El Salvador. One day I see them, the next they are gone. I find out that the ICE came and took them away—”
“Yes, I’ve heard about this family and my office is—”
“Then! Then, I see they put a new, nice-looking grocery store on Third Avenue. I think, oh, good, no more taking this train to Atlantic with this pinche cart just to save a few dollars. Pero no. This place! No coupons. No nothing. The prices are sky-high! Three dollars. For a mango! How is a senior citizen supposed to survive here? This is a neighborhood for working people! I live off of retirement!”
“Se?ora,” he said, mildly out of breath, which disturbed him because it was only a flight of stairs, “I assure you; I understand. I was raised by my abuela, she was a retiree—”
“Save your story for the cameras, okay? I know you. You’ve been around forever. I even remember your grandma. Nice lady. Did the rosary society. But that doesn’t make you good at your job. You are no good at your job!”
But before Prieto could say anything, she took her cart and pushed off. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his brow. He called out to her.
“Tell your grandson to come by my offices and I’ll see what I can do about a job!”
But she just dismissed him with her hands and kept on walking.
* * *
“WHADDUP, TEAM! HAS my sister been on yet?” Prieto called out as he walked into his district office.
The TVs, normally tuned into CNN or NY1, were all showing Good Morning, Later, the show where, occasionally, his sister did segments on weddings and etiquette.
“Not yet,” Alex, his chief of staff, called out, “but I’m hoping it’s soon because I’m losing brain cells by the second watching this nonsense.”
“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.