When Tito Loved Clara (2 page)

C
LARA
, Y
UNIS, AND
Deysei had loaded the suitcases into the back of the Odyssey and were just about to get in when Raúl appeared, carrying the karaoke machine on his shoulder. “Yo!” he called. “You forgot this!”

“We didn't
forget
nothing,” said Yunis.

“This belongs to Deysei,” said Raúl. “I gave it to her.”

“She hasn't played with it in a year,” said Yunis.

“Thing cost me two hundred bucks,” said Raúl.

Clara opened the side door of the van. “Here, lay it across the backseat. We can put it in the basement.”

“You want it?” Raúl said to Deysei. She had her hood over her head now, the white wires of her iPod running from the marsupial pouch. Without taking her hands out of the pocket, she shrugged.

“If she wanted it she would have packed it, wouldn't she?” said Yunis.

“What the fuck am I going to do with it?”

“You could sell it,” said Yunis. “And put some money in those empty pockets of yours.”

And then Raúl looked at Yunis with a yearning that, for Clara, was easy to read and painful to see. The message on his face said:
Please take this. Don't tell me I didn't mean anything to you or your daughter
. This is precisely what Clara had wanted to avoid, a scene between Yunis and Raúl. She often wondered how Deysei put up with it, living in a one-bedroom apartment with her mother and her mother's lover, sleeping on the foldout in the living room while Raúl and Yunis shared the bed next door, listening to them fight, listening to them fuck, inhaling their secondhand smoke, answering the door to their idiotic friends all night, kicking their empty forties across the floor on her way to the bathroom. But, then, Clara reminded herself, hadn't she survived even worse? This empathy for her niece, coupled with her desire for a second child, was the reason she had agreed to take Deysei in.

Staring at Yunis, Raúl set the karaoke machine down on the sidewalk. Clara picked it up and stowed it in the back of the van.

“Come on, baby, say goodbye to Raúl,” Yunis prompted her daughter, not breaking the staring contest.

“You be good. Don't let those thugs in Jersey touch you,” said Raúl, looking away from Yunis.

“Bye Raúl,” said Deysei, and gave him an awkward hug.

“Awright,” said Raúl. He swung his arms and watched Deysei climb into the van's side door. Clara kissed him again on the cheek. “Good luck,” she said.

“I make my own luck,” said Raúl. “Look after her, OK?”

“I will,” said Clara. She slid the door closed and walked around to the driver's side to let Raúl and Yunis have some privacy. She started the engine and, unable to help herself, looked in the passenger-side rearview mirror. Reflected there was Yunis's triumph. Clara wasn't sure, but it looked like Raúl was crying. His head was bent, his hand was covering his eyes, and he was saying something. She suspected that Raúl was weeping more for his own plight than any heartbreak he felt over Yunis departing his life, but the sight of him—muscles, tattoo, pinpoint beard, and all—was moving nonetheless. She took a quick glance over her shoulder at Deysei, who had her hood on, her face darkened, like a penitent, her headphones securely in place.

The passenger door opened and Yunis got in beside her. “Let's go, Sis,” she said, and slapped the dashboard.

Clara pulled out of the parking spot and advanced only a hundred feet or so before stopping at the light on Broadway. The silence in the van was explosive. She turned on the radio: NPR headlines, just winding down. Quickly, she hit the button for the FM dial. Yunis and Clara's cousin Manny borrowed the van from time to time and always changed the presets on the FM dial to hip-hop and R&B stations. It irked Clara, even though she rarely listened to the FM dial. She lived on AM in the car—NPR and 1010 WINS.

“That's my jam!” said Yunis, as one of the hip-hop stations tuned in. “Sis, I didn't know you liked this shit.”

The song that was pouring from the Odyssey's system was a current hit. The rapper was promising all the ladies listening that there was more than enough of him to go around. Yunis appeared willing to wait. She did a chair dance, wiggling her shoulders and
shaking her head. Better by far than the silence of a moment ago, Clara thought, as she headed for the parkway and the bridge.

T
HE TRIP BACK
to New Jersey was an uneventful one. Deysei sat with her arms across her chest, looking out the window and listening to her iPod. Yunis, meanwhile, had spent most of the drive talking on her cell to her cohorts in a mixture of Spanish and English, planning some kind of party when she got to Santo Domingo that evening.

Thomas was waiting for them, sitting on the front steps of the house, sipping from a can of Coke. He had been laid off six months before and Clara wasn't sure exactly how he spent his days aside from putting Guillermo on the bus in the morning, meeting him off the bus in the afternoon, watching baseball games on TV, and cooking dinner. He still had a substantial amount of his severance money socked away but money wasn't yet the issue. He had loved his job and had been gutted when they let him go. The company he'd worked for, BiblioFile, had hired him right out of library school—where he and Clara had met—and she remembered how the job had transformed him from a self-effacing and introverted cataloging specialist into a collegial, confident, professional
man.
They had been dating about a year and a half at that point. Clara always associated Thomas's job with the marriage proposal that came a few months later when he was awarded a small bonus for his contributions to the first project he worked on—a bonus he used to buy her engagement ring.

Thomas had served on a team that digitized paper resources, turning card catalogs, vertical files, and corporate archives into databases searchable through Web interfaces. His team worked for insurance brokerages, law firms, and newspapers on large-scale projects, involving the scanning of hundreds of thousands of pages and the assembly of complex relational databases. Clara, who managed
the library at a medium-sized law firm in Newark, occasionally peeked at the work Thomas brought home with the same bemusement she felt when happening upon a piece of twelve-tone music on the radio or a chemical formula on the Internet. She sometimes felt that her rather traditional library career was lacking by comparison, a Victorian scrivener next to Thomas's twenty-first-century cyberman—at least, she did until her husband was laid off.

Losing his job, he seemed to lose his confidence. She feared that he had been too much defined by his career and not enough by his family, that one day, when he took off his shirt, she would discover that he was made of binary code. It was her hope that having Deysei in the house would somehow galvanize him. He'd been withdrawn of late, but he was, for the most part, a good father to Guillermo, and having a second child to parent might coax further engagement from him.

Clara waved at him as she pulled into the driveway. Thomas waved back. Yunis looked over at her and, in a voice not loud enough to be heard by Deysei, said, “Sis, we got to talk.”

“Right now?” said Clara.

“Right now,” said Yunis.

Thomas had come around the side of the house. He opened the back of the van. “How'd it go?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Clara. “Deysei, why don't you help your
tío
take your things into the house?”

Thomas appeared to get the subtext. “Yeah, I'll show you your new room,” he said with stagy enthusiasm.

“OK, Tío,” Deysei said, pulling the white buds from her ears and getting out of the van. She looked warily back at her mother.

Clara and Yunis watched them go into the house through the back door. Clara had wanted to be the one to show Deysei her new room, the room that had, until a month ago, been set up as a nursery for the baby she and Thomas had lost the previous year. It was now an impersonal space, with no trace of its former intended
use—a queen-sized bed, a chest of drawers in which they'd stored linens, and a closet where Thomas had kept his suits back when he had a job. It was the only room in the house without something on the walls. Deysei would have a clean slate.

“What is it?” Clara asked her sister once Thomas and Deysei were inside.

“You ain't gonna believe this,” said Yunis. “But my daughter is pregnant.”

Clara drew a breath and nodded her head. The news did not completely surprise her. It wasn't that she'd somehow anticipated her sixteen-year-old niece entering her household knocked up; it wasn't that she thought of her as promiscuous or careless; it wasn't that she believed Deysei was doomed to repeat her mother's mistakes (Yunis had given birth to Deysei when she was seventeen). It was merely that, lately, she had come to expect such news—the unpleasant, the inexplicable, the complicating. Every day, she readied herself for the latest in what seemed to be a widening circle of troubling developments—job loss, miscarriage, now teenage pregnancy.

She realized that Yunis was trying to read her reaction, waiting for her to say something. “Let's go get some lunch,” Clara finally said.

“Lunch?” said Yunis.

“Yes. Wasn't that the plan?” she asked, deadpanning. “Lunch and then the airport.”

Yunis shook her head. “You bugging, Sis. This is serious.”

“I know it's serious,” said Clara, “but she's not having the baby
today
is she? And anyway, shouldn't we include her in this discussion? Isn't she the one who's pregnant?”

Yunis looked at her with complete bafflement. “All right. You want to have lunch? Let's go have lunch.”

Clara was buying a little time, time to think about what this meant. They would go to Church's, a soul food restaurant on a
bleak stretch of Springfield Avenue near the on ramp to 1-78, with quick access to the airport. It was her favorite place in Millwood to go when she needed comforting. Church's was where they'd gone after Thomas lost his job and Church's is what Clara had wanted after the latest miscarriage. It was the only food in town that made her feel like her mother's cooking did, a menu featuring fatty hunks of pork, crisp fried chicken, heavy starches, and vegetables boiled to mush. She called Thomas and Deysei downstairs and told them what the plan was. On their way out the door, she took her husband into the mud room and gave him the news.

“Is she going to keep it?” he asked.

“I don't know,” she said. “I guess we're going to talk about it at lunch.”

“My God,” he said. “Well, it's ironic, isn't it?”

“What?”

“All the trouble we've been having . . .”

“Yeah, watch me die laughing,” she said, and they went out to the Odyssey, where Deysei and Yunis were waiting.

It was a short, tense trip to the restaurant. Thomas drove. Clara was in the passenger seat, looking out the window, woolgathering; Yunis in the first row behind them, sullen; and Deysei all the way in the back, the most animated of the three women. She had her hood down, but the iPod buds were in her ears, her chin jutting ever so slightly to the beat. Thomas left the radio off and cheerily asked Yunis a series of questions to which Clara was sure he already knew the answers: What time is the flight? (4:05.) Who's meeting you in the D.R.? (Tío Modesto.) Do you need to get anything before you leave? (Of course.) This effectively passed the time until they got to the restaurant.

Inside, Church's looked as unprepossessing as the street scene outside. Most of the business was takeout; the interior was dominated by a long red counter. There were four plastic patio tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths and beach umbrellas—garden
furniture brought indoors. To add to the effect, strings of fake ivy climbed the walls near the tables. On either side of the counter were cork boards with photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Church and their daughter, Rose Mary, along with newspaper reviews of the restaurant, including one with the headline
BEST RIBS IN ESSEX COUNTY
. It was barely noon, and though they were the first customers, the place smelled like food—like grease and barbecue sauce and boiling cobs of corn. Behind the counter was Mrs. Church herself, a slow-moving, good-humored woman who was given, Clara had noticed, to narrating her own actions.

“Got some customers,” she said as they entered. She handed each of them a folded paper takeout menu. “Have a look,” she said. “Tell me what Edwin and I can make for you today.”

They perused the offerings but there was no doubt what their order would be: chicken and ribs, rice and beans, corn and collard greens.

“I'm not hungry,” Deysei said, pulling out her earphones and winding the cord around her pink iPod. She put her menu back on the counter.

“The food is great here,” said Thomas.

“You've got to eat,” said Yunis.

“I'm not hungry, Mami,” said Deysei again and went to sit at the nearest table.

“
Dios mío,
” said Yunis. “You're not in Washington Heights now, baby. You can't just walk to the corner and get a slice whenever you feel like it.”

“I know, Mami.
I'm. Not. Hungry.
”

“
Ayuda me,
” hissed Yunis, looking at Clara.

They gave their orders to Mrs. Church, who shouted each item to her husband before going back to help him in the kitchen. Then they joined Deysei at the table. As soon as they were seated, Clara spoke up. “Your mom told us, Deysei. Is it true? When was your last period?”

Deysei looked first at Clara and then at Thomas. She was not used to having a man present during such discussions—Clara had almost asked Thomas not to come. But if he was going to be a kind of stepfather to Deysei, he needed to be a part of this discussion.

“Six weeks,” she said.

“Have you taken a pregnancy test?” Thomas asked. That was her husband, thought Clara, always seeking the empirical.