Daughter's Keeper Read Online Free PDF Page B

beautiful,” Jorge said and pressed his lips to hers. She stumbled over a broken cobblestone, and he caught her in his arms.
    ***
    Jorge watched Olivia rub the rough towel across her body. She bent over to dry her legs, and he stared at her round ­bottom, its cleft revealing a hint of the reddish-gold pubic hair that still made him catch his breath with desire whenever he saw it. His penis, which had never quite softened, stirred, and he resisted the urge to stroke himself. Instead, he ducked his head under the water, shuddering against the cold. It had taken him no time at all to grow accustomed to hot showers. In his family’s home there was no hot water in the shower, nor anywhere else in the house. They would no sooner have wasted money heating their bath water than they would have burned dollar bills for fuel.
    Jorge’s family was not poor, exactly, but his father, Juan Carlos, had always had to work not one but two jobs in order to provide for the seven children his wife, Araceli, bore him. His industrious nature might have inched the family more surely up the ladder toward the middle class had he not taken just as seriously his obligation to support his mistress and their four children. It was this combination of dependability and profligacy that was Juan Carlos’s undoing. The money he earned would have allowed a single family some modicum of security and perhaps the barest hint of luxury. It barely kept two fed and clothed.
    Araceli ran a small market out of the front room of their house. From the time they were able to walk and talk, the Rodriguez children were expected to help her in the store, stacking cans of chipotle chilis and Nestle Table Cream, bags of Flor de Mayo and Maizena flour drink powder, jars of El Pollo Cuckoo and Barbacoa. They packed customers’ purchases into crinkly plastic bags, swept and mopped up spills, and wiped away the dust churned up by the cars passing over the dirt road in front of the open door of the market. When he was a student at university, Jorge’s father had gotten him hired onto the ­construction sites where he was the foreman. Jorge had lugged pieces of wood, stone, and brick, and fetched tools and water for the carpenters and masons. His days in Oakland were, in fact, the only ones in his life when he hadn’t had a steady job, and the shame of his sloth was like bitter lemon on his tongue.
    He watched Olivia wrap herself in the old flannel bathrobe she still wore, despite the beautiful, slippery satin one he’d bought her with the proceeds of one of his few days at work. He’d taken the BART all the way to Target in El Cerrito and had spent almost an hour sifting through bits of gossamer and lace until he found one in the precise shade of periwinkle blue of her eyes. He’d anticipated her squeal of delight in such minute detail that he knew her actual response was doomed to disappoint him, but it had been so muted, and her shiver when she’d slipped the glossy fabric over her shoulders so obvious, that he hadn’t been surprised to find the robe shoved into a corner of her lingerie drawer, underneath the panties and bras she wore only when it had been too long since they’d visited the Laundromat. No, he hadn’t been surprised, but he had been angry. He had taken the robe from its hiding place, ironed it precisely, just as he had seen his mother do to all his clothes, even his T-shirts and underwear, and hung it on a hanger on the back of the bathroom door. When she saw it there, Olivia had blushed and explained that it was too cold in the dank apartment for such a beautiful, light garment, but that she promised that as soon as the weather turned, she would wear it. She hadn’t done so yet, and Jorge was sure he could see the robe hanging more limply every day, the blue fading to the flat gray of a foggy Oakland summer sky, and dust gathering on its shoulders.
    ***
    Like most of her friends, neighbors, and