Daughter's Keeper Read Free Page A

the restaurant that she noticed that all the other cars were clubbed.
    After a moment or two, their food arrived and, with relief, Elaine busied herself with her pupusas, dipping them in salsa, blowing on the steaming dough, and tearing off small bites with her meticulously whitened teeth. “These are terrific,” she said. “What a find! They should write about this place in the Oakland Tribune or something. They’re always on the lookout for little out-of-the-way places like this.”
    â€œIt’s only out-of-the-way if you don’t live here,” Olivia said.
    ***
    Olivia pulled out of her parking space and stopped at the light. She looked into her rearview mirror and watched Elaine cross the street and get into her car. She had chosen the restaurant especially to oblige her mother to drive to a section of Oakland that she would otherwise never have entered. It was part of the campaign in which Olivia had been engaged since she was a teenager—to shake Elaine out of her myopia, to force her to confront and understand the desperate circumstances in which people lived just a few miles from the stuccoed mansions of the Berkeley Hills and the gracious brown-shingled homes of the Elmwood.
    Only once she saw that Elaine was safely in her car did Olivia turn her attention back to the street before her. It was, after all, a lousy neighborhood, and she didn’t want anything to happen to her mother. While she drove home, Olivia thought, not for the first time, that Elaine looked worn, almost old. She used to think her mother pretty, but now she saw only Elaine’s sagging skin, the blue-tinted pouches under her eyes, the false brightness of her colored hair, and they made her impatient. Aging seemed, to Olivia, to be another of her mother’s irritating habits, like the slurping sound she made when she drank her morning cup of Earl Grey, or the fastidious grimace she wore when filing her nails.
    Olivia and Jorge lived off Park Boulevard, in a part of Oakland notable only for the ethnic diversity of its inhabitants. Other neighborhoods in the city were segregated with an apartheid-like efficiency that confused Olivia. How did everyone know exactly where to live—exactly on which corner the line of demarcation was drawn? Olivia liked her block’s ­rainbow-coalition flavor. At least she liked it in theory. In practice, nobody talked much to anybody else, and her attempts at neighborliness had gone ignored, by and large.
    As she walked down the long narrow alley that led back to her small apartment tucked behind a three-story building in what had once been a garage, Olivia held her breath. The young black man in one of the front apartments had just brought home a rottweiler puppy, and while Olivia knew she should be grateful to him for cleaning up after his dog, the stench of feces coming from the garbage bins was unbearable. She and Jorge had stopped opening their front window and had taken to burning incense, a smell she found just barely more acceptable than dog shit.
    Jorge was lying on the living room couch, his legs stretched out in front of him. One toe poked through the white sock on his left foot. On the television, men kicked a ball back and forth. Sometimes it seemed to Olivia that an endless loop of a single futbol game played day and night on Spanish-language television. The teams were indistinguishable from one another, and no one ever scored, but Jorge never grew tired of watching.
    â€œHey, little mother, give me a kiss,” he said in Spanish. Nine months in the United States had taught Jorge barely enough English to order a cup of coffee—not surprising since he almost never needed to speak the language. He and Olivia spoke only Spanish together, as they always had. The men who hired him gave whatever instructions were necessary in the same language, and the other workers were all, of course, from Mexico or Central America. Olivia supposed she could have been