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of guy who didn't own a pair of jeans or sneakers. Shouldn't he be here, making sure his wife wasn't absconding with his ancestral china? Maybe it wasn't a divorce, Tito thought. Maybe it was just a separation. Or maybe the husband had run off with his secretary and didn't care about the ancestral china anymore. This is what he loved about his job—the voyeurism, the constant opportunity to speculate about other people's private lives and imagine, if only briefly, that he lived like them. Tito spun out his thoughts as he put the short stacks of books into boxes, filling the crevices and cracks with paper, sealing the boxes tightly with tape. He'd forgotten how this kind of activity with the hands could free the mind. He was so busy daydreaming that he almost failed to notice the edge of the photograph poking out from the book in his hands. The book was a hardcover edition of Julia Alvarez's
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
and the photograph was of the members of the Word Club all seated in Ms. Almonte's room, only it didn't look like her room because there were pillows on the floor and teacups and a plate with some kind of pastry on it. There were seven girls sitting in a semicircle around Ms. Almonte. He knew all of their names, as if they had been the heroines of his favorite television show: Yesenia, Milly, María José, Victoria, Julia, Eva, and Clara. None of them lived in the neighborhood anymore (he'd checked, as best he could, in the phone book, he'd asked around). Occasionally he heard stories about one or another of them, though never about Clara. Many had married white men; one was living in Paris. Another was a surgeon. Standing in Ms. Almonte's den, doing a job he had been doing since he was in school with them, he took a long, inspecting look at their faces. They were just girls. He got that now. They didn't have super powers or anything. Some of them weren't even so good-looking, he was stunned to realize. They were trying too hard, wearing clothes that were too mature for them, arranging their hair in styles that now looked ridiculous. Even so, seeing Clara again stirred something in him thathe could not explain away so easily. This is what he had been looking for. He slipped the photograph into his pocket and kept packing.
    They were done by noon. Her possessions half-filled the truck. None of the appliances were going and only a little of the furniture. It was the small stuff—the books, the bric-a-brac, a few carefully packed pieces of art, and a lot of elegant clothing: five full wardrobe boxes. Tito probably didn't need a two-man crew, but he wanted the whole thing to look official. Raúl and Hector were still securing the cargo in the back of the truck when Ms. Almonte got in her sedan and backed down the driveway, honking as she passed them. Tito started the truck's engine and waited for his boys to close up the back. Then they drove down Route 4, the Washington Heights Highway, to the bridge.
    â€œDamn, she's the whitest Dominican I ever saw,” said Raúl. “Didn't have even one can of beans in her kitchen. I looked. Probably
allergic
to beans.”
    â€œShe's just as Dominican as you or me,” said Tito. “I bet she grew up in the Heights just like us.”
    Raúl sucked his teeth. “I didn't grow up in the Heights,” he said. “I'm from Bushwick. There ain't no Dominicans like her in Bushwick, I tell you what.”
    F ROM THE OUTSIDE, the building she was moving into looked like a significant step down in life, a sooty, once glorious Art Deco structure five stories high. Tito stood on the pavement peering at the names in the little glass windows beside the buzzers, a habit of his. Still a lot of Spanish there. In addition to ALMONTE , he saw a PéREZ , a MARTíNEZ , and a BLANCO . A couple of Irish names appeared, from the faintness of their type, to be the oldest tenants: DEVINE and M c INTYRE . Mixed in with these were two Asians, a