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.
“Look, Alex, I get it. We’ve got that hearing coming up. Let’s fly some UPR students up here, get them on TV, let people see these are just kids, like theirs, trying to get an education. Maybe we can make someone care about this?”
“Sounds good,” Alex offered, hovering.
“Anything else?”
“Yes, Arthur Selby’s office called to invite you to a dinner party next week.”
His pulse quickened. “Tell him that I’m previously engaged.”
“His secretary said he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“Is Arthur Selby my constituent, Alex? The last time I checked he wasn’t even one of my fucking donors.”
“So, that’s a definitive no then, sir?”
But Prieto knew that it was not a no.
“Mark the info on my calendar and if I can make it, I’ll make it.”
REALITY TV
Becoming a post-recession, slightly better-than-’hood-rich wedding planner had required a significant amount of cunning on Olga’s part, but becoming a famous one had been surprisingly easy. Yes, there had been lots of grunt work, but like a ’70s game show, behind each door there had been opportunity. She’d started her business in the nascent era of reality TV and social media and discovered quickly that, if leveraged properly, something of a facsimile to real fame could result. She’d left the fancy college with not quite the right connections to secure one of those lucrative management consulting gigs, but certainly a good enough network to score her a one-off appearance on a Real Housewives franchise as wedding coordinator for Countess von Vonsberg’s third marriage. A decently written press release led to coverage in a magazine, which, when pitched correctly, led to an in-store appearance in the coveted registry department at Macy’s, which in turn got her booked as a regular on a Style Network wedding show. Along the way, she adopted each new social media platform as it was invented, humble-bragging every magazine feature, speaking engagement, and five-second clip in which she opined about wedding trends in advance of celebrity nuptials. For nine years, she did this with exhaustive frequency, until one day a call came with an offer of what was, to wannabe service industry celebrities, the holy grail. A widely watched cable network wanted to shoot her very own TV pilot.