When Tito Loved Clara by Jon Michaud Read Free Book Online

ZHOU and a YAO ; a Jew, GOLDBERG ; and a scattering of others who could only be younger white newcomers, NIELSON, BARRE, RUSSO, the sorts of names you never used to see in Inwood buildings. Hepressed the black button next to ALMONTE and waited. When the buzzer sounded, he secured the doors with bungee cords and signaled to Raúl and Hector to open the back of the truck.
    It was a ground-floor apartment, the door unlocked. He knocked and entered a long, darkened hall. Ms. Almonte was making the journey from the house of Tito's dreams to the kind of dwelling where he had grown up. It was not a step down in life as he had first thought, but a step
back.
Just inside, he was not surprised to see, stood a glass vase for the water of the saints. Above it, a small portrait of the Virgin Altagracia. He nodded at the Virgin like an old friend. The hallway was clean and otherwise bare. At the end of it was the living room, where Ms. Almonte was sitting with an old woman on a white leather couch wrapped in a clear plastic cover. Something about the room looked wrong, as if the furniture had been shifted around by someone who didn't live there. The television was on, showing El Gordo y la Flaca .
    Ms. Almonte introduced him to the old woman, her mother. She looked up at him with incomprehension and, seeing his clipboard, said, “Census?”
    â€œNo,” said Tito. “
Mudancero.
”
    â€œAh!” she said, and took a drink from her glass. She looked at her daughter and asked her who was moving in.
    Ms. Almonte appeared embarrassed by the exchange—or by Tito witnessing the exchange. She stood and led him to an adjoining room, which was empty save for a twin bed with a gaudy floral coverlet. It was a large five-sided room with one window and a doorway that led to another room, which, it seemed, was the mother's bedroom. Ms. Almonte was wearing a dress today, loose black linen, which gently shifted around her skinny frame. “I want everything in here,” she said. “Everything that's not going into storage.” It would look strange, Tito thought, all that modern, highbrow stuff in these immigrant surroundings.
    They emptied the truck of everything except the storage itemsin less than an hour. Carrying in the last of the boxes, he stopped to watch Ms. Almonte trying to feed her mother a lunch of soup and bread.
    â€œYou have to eat something, Mami. You're wasting away.”
    â€œ
No tengo hambre,
” said the mother.
    â€œPlease, eat.”
    â€œ
¡No tengo hambre!
” said the mother, again.
    At this point, Ms. Almonte turned and caught Tito looking. “Yes?”
    He raised his hands in apology. “We're almost finished. I just need you to sign.”
    â€œAll right,” she said. “
Un momentito, Mami.
”
    Out of the classroom, and out of her house, she had lost her aura. Tito no longer felt cowed by her and he was saddened by this realization. Many of the things that had impressed him the most when he was younger—the subway, Christmas, television—seemed perfectly humdrum now and he wished it weren't so, wished he could still be awed. Was it simply because he wasn't young anymore, or was it something worse: an aptitude for disappointment?
    Ms. Almonte signed with an ornate, illegible signature, tipped them generously, and showed them the door.
    T ITO DIVIDED THE tip evenly, thanked Hector and Raúl, and drove them back to the yard. He signed in the truck, filed his paperwork, and went home. Sitting on his couch and sipping from a bottle of Corona, he took out the photograph and stared at it again. It wasn't enough. He had thought it would be sufficient to pilfer this memento of the great mystery of his teenage years, of his first broken heart, but the more he looked at Clara's face and the more he dwelled on the memories and questions she provoked, the more he came to see that the photograph was just like a first kiss—all it did was make you greedy