When Tito Loved Clara

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Chapter One

Clara drove across the George Washington Bridge. She was going back to Inwood to pick up her sister, Yunis, and her niece, Deysei. Inwood, where she had learned to be an American; Inwood, where she had first fallen in love and broken someone's heart; Inwood, the neighborhood of parks and bodegas, of rivers and bridges, the forgotten part of Manhattan she could not forget. Clara's husband, Thomas, who'd grown up in the suburbs of Maryland, had once expressed a passing, semiserious desire to live there, to be among the mulattoes, the remains of the Irish and Jewish communities of the last century, to be one of the newly arrived middle-class couples who'd been priced out of Brooklyn and Astoria. But Clara wouldn't hear of it. "Why did I go to college?" she'd asked. "Just so I could live down the street from all the dumbass immigrants I grew up with? I don't think so."

It was nine-thirty, still a little early for her late-sleeping sister and niece, but they'd have to lump it. The traffic on Broadway budged forward indifferently, the rush hour coming to an end. Clara turned left on 204 and found a spot near the corner of Cooper Street. She locked the Odyssey and walked around the corner, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. She never knew who she'd run into when she came back to the neighborhood and she always feared the worst. The first doorway on Cooper was the entrance to the apartment building where Yunis and Deysei lived with Yunis's ex-con boyfriend, Ral. Ral was about to become Yunis's ex-ex-con boyfriend, Clara thought. Yunis was moving to the Dominican Republic to live with their mother, who had retired to a rum-softened dotage in a suburb of Santo Domingo. Deysei, who was to be a junior in high school that year, was going to live with Clara and Thomas in New Jersey and finish her secondary education at Millwood High—a prelude, everyone hoped, to college. Clara had no idea what Ral planned to do now that he was going to be without a girlfriend and a place of residence, and she hadn't lost much sleep over it. Things had been bad between Yunis and Ral for so long that she was no longer able to recall a time when things were good between them.

In the building's vestibule, she rang the bell and waited for the buzzer. The proportions of the small cement alcove that led from the street to the vestibule corresponded to some sort of golden mean for the capture of stray breezes and the corralling of litter. Sheets of newsprint, candy wrappers, and plastic grocery bags circled the center of the alcove as if riding an invisible carousel. No matter the season or the time of day, the lethargic cyclone spun before the door. In the corner, a Snapple bottle rolled back and forth in the turbulence, as if trying to build up the momentum to join the other garbage in its swirling dance.

Long ago, Clara had dubbed her sister's apartment (and, by extension, her sister's life) the Yuniverse. The Yuniverse was a queendom rife with drama, anxiety, and endless scamming. Its entrance was a brown door on the building's third floor decorated with a bumper sticker that read, VIRGINIA IS FOR LOVERS. A former boyfriend, an ex-navy man turned gunrunner from Newport News, had put it there. (Clara liked to joke that Yunis wouldn't give you the time of day unless you'd seen the inside of a penal institution. The only boyfriend she'd had who wasn't a convict was Deysei's father, and he was an illegal immigrant now living under a false name in Florida.) It had not always been this way. Her sister had once been a sweet, goofy teenager. It had been her good looks, poor grades, and inept use of contraception that led her to the place where she was now.

Ral answered the door. "Yo," he said, swinging his arms with primate restlessness. Ral never seemed to know how to act around her—whether to kiss or fist-bump her. There was something of the beaten animal about him this morning and Clara gave him a quick peck on his cheek, which made him smile. Ral, tall, muscular, strange, moody. He and Yunis were combustible, Clara thought. One a lit match, the other a can of kerosene.

The apartment, like many in New York, was too hot in the winter and too cold in the summer, but today, for once, the place was at a comfortable temperature and, beyond the faint sour whiff of dust, odor free. A hygienic breeze drifted over Clara as she entered. Ral led her past the kitchen, where a half-eaten pernil or lasagna usually sat in a dented tinfoil baking sheet on the table. But the kitchen was clean—spotless. Everything had been put away. The metal basin of the sink had been emptied and recently scoured with a Brillo pad. Most bizarre of all was the rubber drainboard without dishes. Not even a teaspoon in the utensil cup. How odd. Clara wanted to stop and admire it, but she sensed that there were more sights to see up ahead. She wasn't disappointed. In the middle of the living room floor, which had formerly been the home of a Formica coffee table heaped with refuse, suitcases were stacked up. The windows were open. For the first time in the years that she had been coming here, Clara could imagine living in these rooms. She pictured a rental agent saying the word potential. Yunis had been trying to sublet the place before clearing out. She aimed to live in the Dominican Republic without working, to exist on a small inheritance she had come into as well as the rental income from illegally subletting the apartment. Keeping the lease in her name, Clara knew, was also a hedge in case things didn't work out as well as she hoped. If nothing else, Yunis had learned from experience to prepare for reversals.

"Wow," said Clara.

"You should have seen the shit we threw out of here," said Ral, gesturing with his hands as if tossing a medicine ball. "We found newspapers from like four years ago. Busted cell phones, chopsticks, candy with hair stuck to it. Videocassettes. All this stuff, just sitting in here waiting to be thrown away."

"It piles up," said Clara and, for an instant, she had the image of her son, Guillermo, in forty or fifty years, going through her possessions after she and Thomas had died, wondering where it had all come from and why his parents ever kept such things.

"Yeah, man. It does," said Ral, nodding, as if they'd unveiled some profound truth. The two of them had never found enough common ground for even the simplest conversations. Ral, despite his time behind bars, his muscled frame, and his homeboy manner, had always struck Clara as oddly touchy and vulnerable. He was likely to overreact to the smallest thing.

Nearby, Yunis's bags were stacked like a vinyl Stonehenge: three collapsible columns of varying size along with a shapeless hold-all made of a multicolored substance that looked like nylon wicker. Next to them were Deysei's two smaller rolling suitcases and a hard plastic case that looked like something you'd use for carrying bait or tools. In the corner rested a green duffel and two black garbage bags that were, doubtless, the vessels for Ral's possessions. Nowhere to be seen was the array of gray-market contraband that Ral brought home through his mysterious sources: bootleg DVDs of movies that hadn't even been released, handheld gaming systems, watches, clothes, and jewelry. Ral worked as a mover and Clara suspected that at least some of it came from the homes of the people he'd helped...