When Tito Loved Clara Read Online Free PDF Page B

himself from asking her why.
    â€œYes. But some of the items are going to go into storage. I assume you offer that service?”
    â€œWe do,” Tito said. “For how long?”
    â€œIndefinitely,” said Ms. Almonte.
    He nodded and got to work on the estimate, giving her a better price than she would get from anyone else, though there wasn't much he could do about the monthly storage rates. He wrote the figure at the bottom of the sheet and passed it to her along with a Cruz Brothers brochure and his business card. She looked it over. He could read nothing in her face. “I'm getting some other estimates,” she said. “I'll give you a call when I decide.”
    â€œOf course,” he said, taking another sip from his beaded glass. The water in New Jersey always tasted like chemicals to him.
    She walked him back to the door. The whole time he had been there, he had debated saying something. Now he had to decide. Just before stepping outside, he asked, “Does your Word Club still exist, Ms. Almonte?”
    Her eyes flickered at him. “Were you a student of mine? I never forget a student and I don't remember you.”
    â€œI was at Kennedy,” he said, “but not in your class.” And then, after a pause: “I was friends with Clara Lugo.”
    She appeared to consider him anew. “So,
you
were Clara's boyfriend?” she asked.
    Tito did not answer the question. “Let me know if I can help with your move,” he said, and walked back down the steps.
    D EPENDING WHO YOU asked, Ms. Almonte was either the greatest teacher in the history of the world or a hardass, stuck-up
mulata
bitch who thought she was the Queen of England and Miss Manners rolled into one skinny, titless body. She taught A.P. English and was known to fail students for a few misspelled words or for not knowing where to put an apostrophe. But the worst thing a student could do in her presence was throw Spanishwords into an English sentence. “This is an English class,” she would say. “I want to hear English. Your future employers will want to hear English, too.”
    She had followers, mostly college-bound girls who imitated her in every way they could—some more successfully than others. These devotees belonged to the Word Club, an after-school program that had begun as a prep class for the verbal portion of the SAT, but soon morphed into an extracurricular finishing school for a handful of bright, ambitious, assimilated girls headed for scholarships to the Ivy League and Seven Sisters. Behind their backs—and sometimes to their faces—they were called lesbians and wannabe whiteys, but the fact was that almost every boy in the school was in love with Ms. Almonte or one of her girls in a way that the boys would never fully understand or admit to one another. She and her girls were beyond them; they lived in the territory of the imagination.
    Clara Lugo was Tito's Almonte girl. She was neither the prettiest nor the best dressed of them, but she had, by some measures, come the farthest to be there. She was dark skinned and had Chinese eyes. At her temples grew swirls of hair that looked like wispy reinterpretations of her ears. For a Dominican girl, she didn't have much of an ass, but she was tall and her hair was long and thick.
    Tito and Clara had played together as children. Clara's father owned a hardware store on Dyckman Street, and Tito's father was the building superintendent for 222 Seaman Avenue—a good customer. On Sunday afternoons, when the store was closed, the two families met for picnics in the park. Tito retained a clear memory of the last afternoon the families spent together. The Lugos were still wearing their good clothes from Mass while Tito and his parents were dressed casually. He and Clara were in the Emerson Playground, twenty yards from the picnic blanket. Clara came too close to the swing he was on and his foot clipped her in the mouth. It felt