* * *
WHEN ABUELITA DIED, Olga’s mother did not return for the funeral. She and her brother were the only evidence of her mother’s existence in their grandmother’s life. Olga was twenty-seven at the time and while watching her grandmother’s decline had been heartbreaking, the deepest pain came at the funeral mass itself. Sitting there, she felt so profoundly empty, so utterly gutted from the loss, she physically ached for relief. She’d never done her catechism, never made the official sacrament, but at the funeral mass, Olga was the first to go up and receive. The priest said, “Body of Christ,” and she said, “Amen,” curtsied, and crossed herself, just as she had practiced for all those years. She made her way back to her seat, her grandmother’s coffin just a few feet in front of her. She knelt in genuflection. In this moment, one she had coveted for so long, one she thought would hold the wisdom of the entire world, she felt nothing. She wept, with disappointment and loneliness. A sense of loneliness she hadn’t known was possible and one that never truly left her.
Again and again, Olga returned to church after that, hopeful that this visit would be the moment when she was healed. That on this occasion, the anger that so often filled her would be replaced by grace. Eventually, her sense of hope faded into nothing, replaced with ritual. Ritual that brought her closer to her grandmother, that bordered on superstition. Today, with the obsidian rosary being kneaded through her fingers, the ritual felt silly and the empty feeling formed a crater through which she almost slipped. Olga looked up, to the statues, to Abuelita, to her father, to anyone who might be listening, and prayed—
“Dear God, please, let me know what it is to feel loved again.”
LOMBRIZ
Inside his D.C. office, Prieto threw his newspaper down in disgust. The op-ed was nothing short of scathing, raking him over the coals for canceling the PROMESA hearing, calling him “the toothless lion” guarding Puerto Rico. He should have known when he saw that Reggie King bought a ticket to his fundraiser that he’d had something else up his sleeve.
“Alex!” he bellowed out to his chief of staff. “Alex, did you see this shit?”
“Well, sir,” Alex said as he entered the room, “I was the one who put it on your desk, so, yes.”
Some days Prieto detested Alex.
“If it’s any consolation, do you think anyone reads the op-eds in the Daily News?”
“Actually, Alex, yes. Yes, I do. Maybe not your friends from HBS—”
“Kennedy School, but Harvard, yes.”
“Maybe not your friends from Harvard, but my constituents do. The people on The Breakfast Club do. Black and Brown Twitter does. This fucking clown has decided he’s the spokesperson for Puerto Rico all of a sudden and now he’s trying to come at me for my record?”
“I still don’t get why you canceled the hearing. This feels like way more trouble than that would have been,” Alex said, shaking his head.
“You would think, after knowing me for as many years as he has, he’d have the decency to pick up the phone and call me before he pulled this shit.”
The truth was that while yes, the two men had known each other for nearly two decades, it was always a frosty relationship, predicated as it was on Reggie’s romantic interest in Olga. Truth be told, Prieto had long eyed Reggie King with a mixture of contempt, admiration, and, more recently, an odd sense of jealousy. A music impresario, Reggie had cultivated a larger-than-life, rags-to-riches persona that, for years, had been confined to the entertainment arena. More recently, though, Reggie had begun wading into the waters of politics or, as Prieto saw it, moving into his lane. It started with his so-called social impact investments. Reggie’s first venture, Sanareis, was a biopharmaceutical company focused almost exclusively on developing drugs to target and treat diseases adversely affecting Black and Latino people. Diabetes, heart disease, women’s reproductive health. When other music moguls were investing in vodkas and bottled waters, Reggie made headlines for being so community minded. He was suddenly just as likely to be giving an interview to The Atlantic as he was to Vibe. When he launched Podremos—a company that manufactured wind-energy turbines—he made even bigger headlines, and bigger profits. The cover of Forbes, appearances on MSNBC, interviews in The Wall Street Journal. Then, a couple of years ago, Reggie, who for the majority of his career never uttered a peep about being Puerto Rican, suddenly adopted the island as his pet cause. Truth be told, the op-ed hadn’t taken Prieto completely by surprise. He’d noticed some more subtle swipes Reggie had taken at him in the media. He just never thought he’d come at him like this.