Read Online Daughter's Keeper by Ayelet Waldman - Free Book Online Page A

nice profit.
    â€œBut, Jorge, you don’t know any drug dealers. You don’t know anybody like that!” Olivia said.
    â€œI don’t, but who knows who knows, you know?” Jorge smiled. “I just started asking around, and one of the guys I met on that gardening job last month, he introduced me to Oreste. Oreste’s been around. He knows some guys who are connected to the Mexican Mafia. They bring the crank in from Tijuana.”
    Olivia shook her head, wondering how the man who had laboriously copied Pablo Neruda poems onto blue paper with purple marker and decorated them with cutouts of little white doves for her could have become someone who so casually discussed the Mexican Mafia and methamphetamine connections.
    â€œYou’ll get caught.”
    â€œNobody’s going to get caught. It’s all between friends, you know? Gabriel’s friends, my friends.”
    â€œYou didn’t even know this Oreste until two minutes ago. He’s not your friend.”
    Jorge stroked her hair and began unbuttoning her shirt. “Don’t worry, mamacita . I’m not going to touch the stuff. I’m just going to introduce some people. That’s all. Look, I’m a man, Olivia. It’s a man’s job to care for his woman. That’s all I’m doing, caring for you.”
    As he slid her shirt open, he began to kiss her between her breasts. She sighed, wanting to argue with him, but she understood how emasculated he felt. A while ago, he had started secretly ­taking money out of her wallet, and while at first she’d been angry, she soon realized that he was trying only to save himself the humiliation of asking, so she forced herself not to mind. What was hers was his. That was the way it was supposed to be when you lived with someone, when you were in love.
    She leaned back in his arms, not giving up, just, for the moment, giving in.
    The first time Olivia and Jorge had made love it had been in a motel on the outskirts of San Miguel. She had paid for the room. They’d been meeting every evening for a couple of weeks, after she finished her Spanish classes. He hadn’t gone back to Guanajuato after the conference. Instead, he spent his days at the Universidad del Valle de Mexico , the private secondary school and college in town, trying to organize the students there into a union. She would find him waiting for her outside of the Instituto Allende where her classes were, leaning against the wall, usually with one or two of his friends. Then they would all go back to the Universidad for a meeting or a rally. That was what charmed Olivia most about Jorge: his politics and his politicking. A state university student on scholarship, he nonetheless managed to inspire the private school students, most of whom had previously been concerned only with maximizing their earning potential. Jorge taught them to care for el pueblo and la lucha . He organized demonstrations in support of the Indians of Chiapas and against the government’s brutal quelling of their rebellion. He convinced the students to paint murals of Che Guevara on the school’s walls and to boycott classes taught by any professor not sympathetic to their cause.
    Olivia was enchanted by it all. She adored the banners and the pamphlets and the earnest conversation that she could just barely understand. Jorge’s poems about freedom and liberty and the color of her eyes swept her along in a tide of something part love, part politics—the combination so heady, it did her in.
    One evening, after hours of impassioned but seemingly fruitless debate, Jorge stood up in front of a gathering of twenty or thirty student leaders, and, quoting Marx, Castro, and Public Enemy, begged them to strike like their comrades at Mexico City’s public university. The students of Universidad del Valle de Mexico were afraid that their private institution could and would expel them. Jorge convinced them that it