When Tito Loved Clara Read Online Free PDF Page A

had been gazpacho and spring rolls. Maybe McDonald’s made stronger babies, she thought, and felt the absence,as she did from time to time, of the other living organism within her, a kind of physical déjà vu. Deysei’s child was going to need every advantage it could get and she was going to do whatever she could to help.
    On her way back to the table, Clara noticed that Deysei was hastily putting away her cell phone. Who was she talking to? Maybe the baby’s father? What an enabler of subterfuge those devices were. She set the tray on the table with a
voila!
gesture. Deysei was unwrapping the burger before Clara even sat down. She squeezed two tubes of ketchup into the top side of the carton and dipped the massive pillbox of meat and bread into it before taking her first bite. Clara found it hard to watch her niece eat the huge hamburger, the ketchup and the pinkish special sauce smearing on the sides of her face, the soiled napkins piling up on the table between them. She didn’t properly wipe her hands on them; instead, she squeezed them tight and set them down like crumpled moths. Deysei was grinning with delight as she chewed. Clara gazed beyond her niece, scanning the other travelers in the seating area: a cute young woman in college sweats talking on a cell phone; an in-love couple who looked like they were going away on their first vacation together; a salesman in slacks and a polo shirt poring over a spreadsheet (the very image she’d always had of her husband when he was on his business trips); a handsome dark-skinned man hugging a small blond boy. This last pair caught her attention for a couple of reasons. First, the striking disparity between them: the man brown and burly, the boy tow-headed and slender. Second, the man was Dominican and she recognized him. It took a moment to put a name to the familiar, if estranged, face. Then she knew who it was.
    â€œYou OK, Tía?” asked Deysei, then tucked the last of the ham-burger into her mouth and took a long draw on her soda.
    â€œYes,” said Clara, standing up. “Let’s go. You can eat those fries in the car.”
    T HEY WENT BACK out to the parking lot, Clara hustling her niece.
    â€œWhat’s the hurry, Tía?” Deysei asked.
    â€œNothing,” said Clara.
    â€œThen why we rushing?”
    â€œCome on,” said Clara, not explaining.
    In the Odyssey, waiting to pay for parking, Clara ran her tongue along the inside of her lower lip. There was the scar tissue where her teeth had nearly been driven through her own flesh—but the scar tissue also covered another, deeper wound that she could not touch. Tito Moreno. Where else but in an airport—a place of transience, a place of such consternation for her—would she see for the first time in years the boy, now a man, for whom she had such complicated feelings? And, to further complicate those feelings, he was there in the airport with a beautiful blond child. Was Tito that child’s father? It hardly seemed possible, but then wasn’t she often mistaken for the nanny of her own light-skinned son? He looked well, fit and healthy, though she thought she saw (or wanted to see) melancholy in his face as he hugged the boy. It was conceivable that the boy’s mother had just departed on a trip. Clara imagined her as a businesswoman, like one of the attorneys she worked with. It was hard to believe that Tito would have ended up married to a lawyer, but anything was possible.
    They were on 1-78. Soon they would be home and then she would have to figure out what to do about her niece. Then she would have to talk to Thomas about what the fertility doctors had said. And now Tito. What was she supposed to make of that?
    â€œTía?” said Deysei from the passenger seat, as if reading her mind. Clara glanced over. Deysei was staring at her, the empty red carton of fries cupped in her hand.
    â€œWhat is it? Are you still