There were moments of closeness, here and there. When Prieto married. When Lourdes was born. When their grandmother died. But generally speaking, when Olga lost Reggie, she also lost Mabel. She wished she could call her cousin now, but things had been too weird for too long at this point to trust her with such sensitive information about her brother. Days like today made her feel so lonely.
She picked up her phone and texted Matteo.
* * *
PRIETO DROPPED HER off at a bar where she said she was “meeting a friend.”
“Olga,” he said through the window, with a weary smile. “You don’t have any friends.”
“I know. It’s why I hate when we fight.”
“At the end of the day, it’s your house.”
She walked around to his side and leaned in. “At the end of the day, it’s the family house, but I wouldn’t have offered it if he didn’t need it, Prieto.”
He put his hand on the top of her head.
“I don’t know who you’ve got more of, Abuelita or Mami,” he said, and drove away.
STOOPS
Olga teetered into a bodega and picked up a six-pack of beer, desperate to get out of her uncomfortable heels. A white girl, she thought, would just walk barefoot the half block to Matteo’s house. She had seen them, the girls, barefoot on the filthy sidewalks. Her grandmother would roll in her grave. He had wanted to meet at a bar, but she had texted that after the day she had she really didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even a bartender. She realized, after she hit send, that implied that she didn’t consider him “anyone,” but she was too weary to overthink it.
He was waiting for her on the stoop, also with a six-pack, a small speaker by his side pumping out an old Spinners tune. She felt happy when she saw him in a way that was new to her. He was soothing. Like sweet fried plantains. They smiled at each other in silence as she walked up the brownstone steps to the top of the stoop, sat down, rested her back against the banister, and swung her feet up onto Matteo’s lap. He unbuckled her sandals while she opened a bottle of beer, giving each foot a squeeze as he did so.
“This is a good song,” she said.
“Ah, the best. But you know what?”
“What?”
“It sounds better on vinyl.”
“Well, shit,” she said, “tell me what doesn’t?”
“Fair point.”
A skinny old man in a muscle tank and basketball shorts pushed a reappropriated IKEA shopping cart piled high with his possessions—framed art, bags of clothes, a folding chair, an old-school boom box—up the street past them. He called out to Matteo.
“Yo! My man! You got something you can contribute to my battery fund? I’ve got no juice.” He gestured to the boom box.
Matteo slid out from under her feet and bounded down the steps, slipping the guy a bill. He quickly resumed his position as her footrest.
“You think he’ll really use the cash for batteries?” Olga asked. The man had reminded her of her father towards his end, and the melancholy of the car ride blanketed her again, thick as the summer air.
“Freddie? Yeah. He loves that friggin’ boom box. He’ll stand in front of the bodega all day with that shit blasting. He’s harmless, but you know, the new blanquitos … he creeps them out a little bit.”
“Yeah. My dad, at one point, was kind of like that.” Olga could feel Matteo’s attention on her. She continued: “But he definitely wouldn’t have used the money for batteries, as much as he loved music.” She laughed, though the memory was not funny to her.
“Did I tell you my dad was a junkie when he died?” she asked, knowing fully well she had avoided the subject deftly to this point. “Basehead, too. A long fall from his Young Lords days.”
“Overdose?” Matteo asked quietly.
“Nah. People didn’t OD back then like now. AIDS, though, that was a different story. Death sentence. My Papi was a functioning addict for a long time. Kept a job, would still come and see us, like normal. But then, you know, the same old story. Starts missing shifts, loses his job, starts coming around high, then he’s pawning shit, then he’s stealing shit to pawn. But! In all that time, the only thing he’d never sell were his records! Anyway, one morning, Abuelita found all the albums in crates in the front yard of our house. His landlord heard he was sick and kicked him out. Papi carried out his records and the landlord burned everything else in the backyard. Magic Johnson had already played in the fucking Olympics with HIV, but this guy was afraid of a mattress. Co?o. After that day, for a couple of months we couldn’t find him. Then, we got a call from the hospital.