Read When Tito Loved Clara for Free Online

like nothing to him, but she cried out and brought her hand toher face. When she drew it away, her fingers dripped with blood. She ran to the blanket, where their parents were sitting with Clara's baby brother, Efran, eating
pastelitos
and drinking beer. “ ¡Que bar-baro! ” he heard his mami say, and then his papi came and yanked him off the swing to make him apologize.
    Soon after that, his father and Don Roberto stopped speaking to each other. At first Tito thought it was because of the bloody lip, but, he later learned, the issue was a faulty power drill that Clara's father refused to take back, saying that it had worked fine when he sold it to Tito's father. The dispute escalated and Tito's papi took his business to the Jewish hardware store on Broadway—a declaration of war. Clara's papi started saying things about Tito's father, implying that he had lived too long in that building full of white people, that he had forgotten he was Dominican, that his son watched too much TV. He was going to grow up godless and unable to speak Spanish. Tito had always been afraid of Don Roberto. He was big and loud, with a chipped tooth and pockmarked cheeks. How could a man so ugly have produced a daughter so becoming? He liked to slam his hands on the counter of his store when he was making a point to one of his customers—and, it seemed, he always had a point to make.
    Tito was forbidden from playing with Clara and she became, in time, just another neighborhood girl, glimpsed in the subway station or crossing Broadway. Over the following months, his mother subjected him to a propaganda campaign about Clara's family. She said that Doña Dolores was not actually Clara's mother, that everyone in Inwood knew this. Don Roberto, she claimed, had abducted Clara from the Dominican Republic and brought her to the United States. Her father was strict with her, and her stepmother was wicked—straight out of
Cinderella.
At the time, Tito thought this was all just part of the feud between his parents and the Lugos and he forgot about it. Soon enough, he befriended some of the kids in the building his father managed and Clara all but slippedfrom his mind. That is the way things stayed until high school, when in a process as mysterious and unmeasurable as the growth of fingernails, she reemerged from the general population of girls to become, first, a girl and, then, the girl. By then, she had grown and filled out, matured. Once she joined the Word Club, she began straightening her hair and wearing stylish clothing. She occupied more and more of Tito's mind and took on a significant role in his fantasy life. Between classes he looked for her, and when she did appear from the throngs in the halls, he trailed behind her, floating in the wake of her smell—of gardenias and candy—like a cartoon character following the scent of a freshly baked pie. Sometimes he would trail her all the way to the other side of the school, far from his next class. The bell would ring and he would come to himself alone in the hallway, late again.
    L EAVING M S. A LMONTE'S , Tito drove back to Washington Heights, his mind in turmoil. He had not seen Clara for fifteen years, but he continued to think of her often. When he conjured his imaginary family life in the suburbs, the role of his wife was usually played by a grown-up Clara, especially when he was between girl-friends, as he was now. She was the template for his longings.
    Tito had just moved out of his parents' apartment and was still unpacking his new studio on Broadway and 190th Street. When he got home, it took him a while to find the box, the one marked MISC. PAPER . Inside the box he dug through an assortment of documents in plastic sleeves—his tax returns, his U.S. passport, his naturalization certificate, his high school diploma, his Dominican passport, his birth certificate—to find the Ziploc bag of envelopes and postcards that represented nearly all the real mail he