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

wasn’t enough to speak sympathetically of rebellion. They had to act. By the end of his oration, they voted overwhelmingly to strike.
    That night, Olivia walked with the boy she imagined to be a young García Lorca down the Avenida de Zacatecas and out to the main road. They found a motel—the kind of place where cars drove into private carports in front of each individual room and their drivers pulled shut the flimsy metal doors behind them, hiding them from view.
    When they checked in, the old woman at the counter asked if they were staying the night or un rato —a little while. Before Olivia could buy them an entire night on the sour sheets and thin foam mattress, Jorge muttered, “ Solo rato,” and took the key.
    Unlike their necking, which had been languid and passionate, night after night on a bench in the park or in doorways along the street, the first time they made love was rushed and almost grim. When they walked into the dank little room, Jorge undressed quickly, motioning her to do the same. Olivia, who, despite the evidence of poetry and white doves, had more of a sense of romance than her lover, could have ignored the forty-peso room and imagined them in a canopy bed with an entire lifetime to spend in each other’s arms. Jorge, it seemed, could not. He tore the wrapper off of a condom, entered her roughly without any preamble, and came almost instantly. He was dressed again before she’d even had a chance to inhale. They walked back the way they came, holding hands, but only because that was the way they’d walked there, and the contrast of not touching would have been too stark. He left her at her room, and she didn’t see him again until the next afternoon, when she found him waiting in his usual spot outside the Instituto , a bouquet of purple irises in his arms.
    That night marked what might have been the end of Olivia’s infatuation with Jorge. Her disappointment with their lovemaking seeped into the rest of her relationship with him, and although she continued to echo his words of love and devotion, part of her felt like a fraud. She could not bear the thought of herself as a dilettante who casually took up with a Mexican man in a kind of excess of touristic fervor—too many of the American girls she met in Mexico seemed to have a travel checklist: see the sights, eat the food, sleep with the men—but at the same time her attempts to imagine a future with Jorge failed her and ultimately inspired her escape back home. When he had arrived in California, his skin caked with grime, his hair stiff with dust, and his pockets emptied by the “coyote,” she had pushed all doubts out of her mind. He had sacrificed too much to follow her, and there was no longer room for ambivalence.
    ***
    Olivia was a good waitress. She wasn’t particularly interested in food, and she never knew what wine went with what dish, but she was attentive to and friendly with her customers, complimenting their choices and encouraging them to try a piece of flourless chocolate cake or an appetizer of sautéed calamari. While her solicitude came naturally to her, she was competent and amiable because she got better tips that way, not because she liked her customers. She came close to hating them at times, particularly late at night when groups of men, liberated from their decency by the absence of their wives and girlfriends, made jokes that they ­mistakenly believed were beyond her comprehension and grabbed her ass.
    By 11:30 at night, Olivia’s smile was so tight it hurt. After she pulled off her white apron and bundled it into her bag, she had to grip her cheeks with her hands and massage her face back into something resembling a human expression. She dug her hands into her pockets and pulled out the wadded bills. Ninety dollars. Pretty good. Enough to pay the electric bill.
    Jorge was waiting at the bar, deep in conversation with Gabriel. The two men had hair