When Tito Loved Clara

by Jon Michaud

  In due time, Tito received the rest of his payment, but it wasn't until three years later that María Luisa took care of the final piece of business. She came to him with divorce papers, severing their union because she wanted to get engaged to an MTA track worker named Manuel (a regular customer at the restaurant, Tito later found out). By then, María Luisa's transformation from bewildered immigrant to barrio eye candy was complete. This was before he had met Jasmina, and it occurred to Tito that his mother might have set the whole thing up in the hopes that he and María Luisa would fall in love and stay married, like one of those arranged marriages. There was no chance for such a scheme—if that's what it was—to succeed. Tito could not think of María Luisa as wife material. She was a campesina, a hick.

  His new apartment was much closer to El Malecon than to his parents' place and, without his mother to cook for him, Tito found himself going there more often. He went in now and sat at the counter. The place was bright and glassy, with chrome furniture and Plexiglas sheets laid over the green tablecloths. Fake flowers adorned every table. María Luisa was taking an order from an older couple at one of the few occupied tables. A female MTA employee Tito recognized from the Dyckman Street token booth sat at another table reading the paper and eating eggs. In the corner table a high school girl, who looked like she was cutting class, whispered into a cell phone. Though it opened at six a.m., the place was much more about the meals consumed later in the day. At nine o'clock that night, most of the tables would be filled and a ball game would be on the TV where the Univision morning news was now being shown. At the counter he could hear loud and clear the chime of dishes being unloaded from a washer in the kitchen.

  “Ay, Tito, mi amor. ¿Cómo estás?” María Luisa asked, having taken the elderly couple's order. She kissed him on the cheek.

  “Bien. ¿Y tu?” He checked her out. Looked like she was putting some of the weight back on. She didn't need to be so careful now that she was married.

  “Bien, bien.” She went around the counter. “¿Café?” she asked.

  “Sí,” said Tito. “Café y pan, por favor. ¿Y Manuel?”

  “Working hard,” she said, placing coffee on the counter before him. She fetched him a roll and some butter. Tito never liked to eat a big breakfast.

  “So, you like being married again?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Second time is better.”

  “That's because I broke you in,” he said. “Manuel ought to thank me.”

  “I'll have him send you flowers,” she said, looking at him mischievously, smirking.

  “What's that smile for?” said Tito.

  “I'm pregnant,” she whispered, leaning across the counter toward him, showing off her generous cleavage.

  “Ah! ¡Felicidades!”

  “Shh!” she said. “I haven't told her.”

  Her was Lourdes, the owner of the restaurant.

  “When are you due?”

  “January,” said María Luisa.

  As if on cue, Lourdes came out of the kitchen and gave María Luisa a get-back-to-work look.

  “I better place this order,” María Luisa said, holding up her pad. “Coffee is on the house, you hear?” She disappeared through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

  Tito put five dollars on the counter and walked out. María Luisa could get into trouble for giving him food.

  He went up Broadway and then turned on Vermilyea, going past the fire house and the post office, taking 204 over to Sherman. He had thought María Luisa might have been pregnant before she and Manuel tied the knot—that would have explained her haste to divorce Tito—but a January due date meant they'd probably conceived on their honeymoon. Some kid was going to be born an American citizen because of what he'd done. It didn't feel like a crime.

  At Ms. Almonte's building, he was buzzed in without a greeting. She was waiting at her mother's door, wearing those scalpel-like glasses and another sleeveless dress, her arms as narrow as dowels.

  “Ah, Mr. Moreno. Thank you for coming so quickly.” She opened the door to let him pass into the apartment. It had been a little more than a week since the move but the change in the place was apparent. It was cleaner, brighter, more orderly, as if a dozen unsightly objects had been removed from each room.

  “Of course, I'm sorry to hear—”

  “I don't care about your apologies. It's very important to me. My mother gave it to me for my quinceañera.”

  “What?”

  “The bangle. A gold bangle. It was in the top drawer of my bureau and now it's not there.

  “A bangle?”

  “Yes. You know what a bangle is, don't you? A circular piece of jewelry worn on the wrist. It's only gold-plated. Whoever stole it won't get much for it—if he is even able to sell it. But it means a great deal to me. I don't like to make accusations, but it was there the day before the move and I haven't seen it since.”

  Now that he understood, Tito was elated that he wasn't going to have to give back the photograph. “I'm very sorry,” he said. “I will look into it.”

  “Good. I thought you might try to deny that things could go missing during a move.”

  “No,” he said. “I can't deny that.”

  “Then you should know that there was also two hundred dollars in cash that vanished on the day of the move, but I blame myself for that. You shouldn't leave money lying around when you have strangers in your house. But I'm not worried about the money. It's the bangle I need.”

  “I promise, I'll do everything I can,” he said. “And where is your mother?”

  Ms. Almonte put her hand to her hair, just a gentle pat, though, from her expression, you'd have thought her head was about to fall off. “She hasn't been feeling well the last couple of days. I finally had to take her to the hospital.”

  “The hospital?”

  “Yes, we were in the emergency room last night, so please forgive me if I'm not quite myself.”

  “I'm sorry. How long do they think she'll be in there?”

  “The doctors don't know.” She looked away from him.

  “I'm sorry, I should go. I'll do whatever I can to get your bangle back.”

  “I'd be shocked if it was the little Mexican. You should start with the tall, muscular one,” said Ms. Almonte. “I'm sure he took it.”

  THIS WAS TITO'S thought, too. He could not remember having seen Raúl since the Almonte move. He walked back to where his car was parked, near the restaurant, and drove up Broadway to the Cruz Brothers yard. In the lot, he pulled into his designated spot: T. MORENO—SALES. The yard was almost empty. Only one truck was parked there and its hood was up. The mechanics, Armand and Juan, dressed in soiled red Cruz Brothers T-shirts, sat on folding chairs near the truck drinking bottles of Arizona ice tea and talking about the pennant race. Tito waved at them as he walked along the line of parked employee cars toward the office entrance. Moving, like auto repair and garbage disposal, was a mostly male profession. When he had been on the trucks, he had grown weary of all the macho talk—“I'll-kick-your-ass” this and “Suck-my-cock” that. Now that he was in the field, he dealt mainly with women and was happier. Closer to the office entrance were the three European luxury cars driven by the three Cruz brothers: Ozzie, Ronnie, and Orlando. You could measure your place in the hierarchy by your parking spot, and though Tito had been with the company longer than anyone with a parking space, he was still separated from the brothers by a number of spots.

  The offices were in a small building adjacent to the main ware-house. Tito walked through the entrance and turned down a corridor to the cramped room where he and the other sales reps worked. Only Fat Carl was in there now. He had his feet up on his desk, his head cocked to pin the phone against his massive shoulder. Carl gave Tito a mock salute and Tito thought about going in to shoot the shit. Though he had no other appointments scheduled that morning, he was certain there were messages on his voicemail and e-mails in his inbox. Orlando had promised the reps they would be getting BlackBerrys soon.
Tito dreaded the thought—the total intrusion of work into his nonworking hours. He saluted Carl back and proceeded to the dispatch room.

  Orlando Cruz, the youngest of the brothers, was in his accustomed place, seated on a chrome-wheeled office chair that had been patched with duct tape, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He was an old-fashioned two-pack-a-day addict, with a voice to match. Through half-moon spectacles, he looked down at the schedule on his desk and out through the large picture window, monitoring the comings and goings of the company's fleet of trucks. Ozzie and Ronnie Cruz, the elder brothers, were the dealmakers, the public faces of the operation—they negotiated with the corporate clients and insurance companies, bought and sold the trucks and supplies, handled payroll and benefits—but it was Orlando who made the business run day-to-day. He knew every employee by name and could tell you without looking at the schedule where everyone was working on a given shift. It was Orlando who had implemented a computerized inventory system that barcoded every box and manifest. Señor Homeland Security they called him. Some of the guys liked to joke that pretty soon he'd be implanting GPS chips into their asses so that he'd know when they were cheating on their girlfriends, too. As Tito entered the room, Orlando was busting the balls of one of the crew chiefs on the radio about a parking ticket.

  “Don't tell me you couldn't find no parking on Riverside Drive at two in the afternoon.”

  “Yo!” said the crew chief (Antoine, thought Tito, though he couldn't be sure). “There was no parking. They were filming some dumbass movie. There were trailers and trucks all over the motherfucking place. I double parked, blocked some dude in. All he had to do was ask me to move the truck but he went over to Broadway and found a traffic cop to give me that goddamn ticket.”

  “It's coming out of your check, man,” said Orlando, smiling at Tito. He'd given Tito this treatment many times back when he worked on the trucks.

  “No fucking way! You can't do that to me,” said Antoine.

  “You know what garnishing means? I'm not talking about the cilantro they put on your steak. I'm talking about taking the money for this ticket out of your check.”

  “That's bullshit, man. You take that out of my check and I ain't gonna have anything left. Not even for a bottle of beer after work on Friday. Not even for that Old English piss.”

  “Good, you shouldn't be drinking, anyway.” Click.

  Laughing out loud, Orlando swiveled his diminutive self around in the office chair. “Tito Suave!” he said, when his guffaws had subsided. “What's good?”

  “Poor Antoine,” said Tito. “How are you?”

  “Good. You liking your new place? You haven't called your mami begging her to take you back yet?”

  “Not yet,” said Tito, refusing to take the bait.

  Orlando looked a little disappointed not to get a rise out of him. “So, what you need? You come to check on Phil? He's already loading up that job of yours on 183rd. You going to swing by there and see how it's going?”

  “Probably not. I'm actually looking for Raúl Herrera. Where's he working at today?”

  “Nowhere. Raúl hasn't shown up for work in a week,” said Orlando.

  “A week?”

  “Yeah. And if he shows up again it'll be so I can fire his ass. Should have done it a long time ago. He hasn't been too consistent in making it in lately, if you know what I mean. He gave me some story about how his girlfriend left him and he was homeless. What do you want with him? You putting together a crew?”

  “Nah. I think he stole something from a client.”

  “Shit. This guy. Nothing but trouble.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know he was in Rikers, right?”

  “No. I thought he was clean.”

  “It was small-time shit. Drugs. Whatever. I took him on as a favor to a friend of my wife's.” Orlando affected a high-pitched voice: “ ‘He needs a job or he'll just go right back to selling.’ Last time I do that. You could tell that there was something wack about that kid.”

  “You know where I can find him?”

  “Like I said, he was homeless last I heard. Evelyn will give you whatever address we've got on file. Probably the girlfriend. Did you ever see her?”

  “Raúl's girlfriend? No.”

  “Mmm. She has an ass on her to make you weep. Anyway, maybe someone in her building will know where Raúl is. You want to file insurance for what he stole?”

  “Nah. It's worth nothing. Sentimental value.”

  “One-of-a-kind type deal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That's the worst. Money can't fix it.”

  “But it fixes everything else, I guess,” said Tito. “I'll see you later.”

  The hallway that led to the “executive suite” where Ronnie and Ozzie had their offices and private bathroom was lined with photographs of the various iterations of the Cruz Brothers truck, from the seventies when the company was started with a secondhand pickup to the current models, which had air-conditioned cabs and Orlando's beloved GPS systems. (“You know how much money we lose because our stupid drivers don't know the difference between east and west?” he asked his brothers when they were arguing over the cost.)

  Evelyn, the company secretary, sat at her desk with Ronnie's and Ozzie's doors (both closed) behind her. There was a small waiting area with a water cooler, a couch, and a coffee table bearing a two-year-old copy of Money magazine's Best Places to Live issue and a Latina with J-Lo on the cover. Evelyn was at her desk, trussed into a peach-colored pantsuit, her dyed, wax-colored hair falling to her shoulders in curls, her lipstick glistening, all of this part of her daily effort to disguise her age, which was unknown, though Tito figured she was at least fifty. He always thought she looked and smelled like a dessert—some kind of sundae that sounded irresistible on the menu but turned out to be too rich to finish. They were the two longest-tenured employees of the company not named Cruz, and there was a familial ease between them.

  “Tito, baby. How you doing today?”

  “Fine, Evelyn. And you?”

  “I'm keeping it together. You unpacked yet?”

  “Getting there.”

  “Your momma been sending over care packages for you—arroz con guandules? What? ¿Rabo?”

  “Nah. I been eating Chinese, like everyone else in the world who can't cook.”

  Evelyn laughed. “Ain't that the truth. So what you need? You filing for vacation?”

  “No, I'm looking for whatever address you have for Raúl Herrera.”

  “Raúl. Hmmm. Haven't seen him around in a while. Let me check what we got.” She stood and walked to the filing cabinet, which she unlocked. Tito moseyed over as casually as he could to watch her finger the files. She had manicured nails painted with shooting stars. A manila folder came up and was opened. It held a single sheet of paper. Evelyn turned it over.

  “Here it is. We was sending his check to 86 Cooper Street, apartment 3G. Why you looking for him?”

  “He stole something from a client.”

  “Oh no he didn't.”

  “ 'Fraid so,” said Tito. “You know he was in Rikers, right?”

  “Yeah, I do now.”

  “And you know he was trying to hook up with that chick—the one that got murdered.”

  “No,” said Tito. “He hit on her?”

  “She called Ronnie the day after the move and said she was going to sue for sexual harassment or something.”

  “Did she?”

  “No,” said Evelyn. “Ronnie talked her down. This is all confidential. You can't be telling nobody. Ronnie would kill me.

  “I won't say a word. Thanks, Evelyn.”

  FOR REASONS HE did not completely understand, this pursuit of Raúl was becoming increasingly urgent for Tito. It jangled déjà vu deep inside him. He turned it over in his mind as he drove south along Broadway. The brothers had a collection agency at their disposal, but he didn't see how he could ask them to recover a bangle, and a cheap one at tha
t. He swerved around a triple-parked car and came to a stop at a light. Nearby, on Dyckman, was the storefront that had once been Lugo Hardware. It was now a place where you could cash checks and send money overseas—probably a front, Tito thought. Staring at the sign ENVIOS DINERO, he connected the déjà vu sensation with the actual memory.

  It was his search for Clara, of course. After recovering from the initial shock of her farewell letter, he tried to be stoic, to accept that she was gone, and to be grateful for the pleasures of the summer. He tried to see it all through her eyes. She was starting anew, going to college, on a path that would take her away from her miserable life in Inwood. (Never mind that he was part of that miserable life.) She didn't want anything—or anyone—holding her back. He talked to himself like this for most of the autumn, talked to himself until he nearly bought it, talked to himself so much that he started to think that he was Clara. The explanations and excuses for what she had done became more convoluted and insane every time he went over them. But finally he reached a point where he had to acknowledge the idea that he could not see things from her point of view, that he could not understand what she had done. All his elaborations were no more than an attempt to overcome the fundamental wrongness of Clara's note. It didn't add up. Something was missing. As the weeks had progressed toward winter, he'd felt an increasingly frantic need to see her again, even if it would only be an opportunity for her to say, “Can't you read? What part of ‘Do not try to contact me’ don't you understand?”