When Tito Loved Clara (3 page)

“Yes, Tío,” she said, and glanced at her mother.

“I made her,” said Yunis. “Last night. She didn't want to. But I knew something was going on. It had been too long since she took one of my pads.”

“So, you haven't been to a doctor yet?” said Clara.

Deysei shook her head.

“OK,” said Clara. “We're going to get you to a doctor this week. I have a good OB.”

Deysei nodded, not saying anything. She looked like a framed corporal facing a military tribunal—frightened but hopeful of exoneration.

“Does the father know?” said Clara.

Yunis interjected. “She won't tell me who the damn father is. It's probably that fool Eduardo. That moron has been following her around for months. ‘Hey, baby. Hey, baby.' I told you to stay away from him.”

Hidden beneath her overalls and her hoodie, Deysei had the kind of rounded, big-boned, heavy-bottomed body most Dominican men loved. Clara, who was skinny by comparison, could tell it was a burden for her niece and, surely, a big reason for her choice of attire. “Does the father know?” she asked again, ignoring her sister's outburst.

Deysei's face contorted as she tried to keep the tears back. She shook her head.

“It's all right,” said Clara, and put her hand on her niece's cheek. “It's OK.”

“God damn it. It's not all right,” said Yunis. “How can I leave now? How can I go to D.R. now, like this? I can't leave her with you.” And Clara saw that this relatively minor inconvenience—missing her flight, delaying her escape—not the larger issue of her daughter's pregnancy, was irking Yunis.

“Let's all try to stay calm,” said Thomas, to which Yunis rolled her eyes.

“Do you want to tell us who the father is?” Clara asked. She put her hand on Deysei's and squeezed.

Deysei shook her head.

“Sis, you're being way too nice. You can't ask her. She's got to
tell
us. You've got to
demand.
”

“Now isn't the time,” said Clara. She looked over at Thomas. He in turn was looking at Deysei intently—as if
he
were the father and about to be blamed for all of this.

Clara continued: “Deysei, sweetheart. You don't have to tell us the father's name, but there are two questions you're going to have to answer before too much longer. The first is, are you going to tell him? The second is, do you want to keep the baby?”

Deysei appeared overcome by the magnitude of these questions. She covered her face and began to weep.

“Why you crying?” said Yunis. “This ain't nobody's fault but yours. If you hadn't been screwing around there wouldn't be anything to cry about.” Clara now regretted suggesting they go out to lunch. Her hope had been that a public venue would keep the tone of the discussion civil. She hadn't expected the place to be so empty. It was August. Everyone was somewhere else.

“Yunis!” said Clara. “Don't be so hard on her. It's too late for that now. You did the same thing when you were her age.”

“Yeah, like I was the
only
teenage mother in New York,” said Yunis.

“All right, all right,” said Clara, holding up her hands, wanting to get off
that
subject. “Look, there's no reason you can't go
to Mami's today, as long as Deysei is OK with that. There's still a couple of weeks before school starts. We don't have to decide anything right now, except whether you're going to get on the plane this afternoon. And if you don't get on the plane, Mami's going to wonder what's going on.”

“I've got to tell her.”

“That's up to you,” said Clara.

“Please don't tell Abuela,” said Deysei, wiping her nose on a paper napkin. “Please don't tell her, Mami.”

“Wow. She's going to be a great-grandmother,” said Thomas. “And she's not even sixty yet, is she?”

“No,” said Clara. She hated the fact, hated every stereotype it conformed to, but it was true.

“My mother was almost sixty when Guillermo was born,” said Thomas.

“
OK,
” said Clara.

“Shit,” said Yunis. “Mami's going to flip. All right. I ain't gonna tell her until we decide what we're going to do.”

“You mean until Deysei decides,” said Clara.

Yunis looked at her daughter. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Mrs. Church emerged from the kitchen door with a basket of biscuits and a pitcher of iced tea. “You look hungry,” she said. “I got food for you. A lot of good food. Edwin has outdone himself today. I'm bringing it now. Here I come.”

“Let's eat,” said Clara. “We have a plane to catch.”

C
LARA HATED AIRPORTS
. It was her conviction that the airport experience was a fair analogy of what awaited her immediately after death—that her credentials for the afterlife were more likely to be inspected by someone who dressed like an airline attendant than a pre-Raphaelite archangel and that the Pearly Gates would probably resemble customs and immigration more than the entrance to an upscale retirement community. As she pulled into
the short-term parking lot for Newark Liberty Airport's terminal A, she recalled a flight to the Dominican Republic she'd taken the summer between college and library school. She was going there to be feted by her mother, to be shown off like a prizewinning show dog, the first in the family to get a degree. Half an hour into the flight, the pilot had announced that they were turning the plane around and going back to New York. There was something wrong with one of the engines—or at least the possibility of something being wrong with one of the engines, the announcement wasn't clear. The pilot said that it was nothing to be concerned about, that the other engines could take the weight of the plane in the event one failed. They were just being careful. Clara's reaction to this announcement was emphatic disappointment. “No!” she said aloud, drawing stares from her fellow passengers. Her disappointment was not because of the lengthy delay that was sure to follow, but rather because she thought of air travel, like death, as irrevocable. From the moment the ticket was purchased, the die was cast. It was partly for this reason that she refused to entertain the idea of Yunis not going to D.R. It was fate, fate that Deysei would become her responsibility, fate that Clara would learn that her niece was pregnant the same week that a doctor had told Clara that she might not be able to have another child.

There had been little talk in the Odyssey since they'd stopped at the CVS on Springfield Avenue. Thomas had parted company with them at Church's, walking home to meet Guillermo off his summer-camp bus. The iPod buds were back in Deysei's ears, isolating her as firmly as a language barrier. Meanwhile, Yunis had spent the drive to the airport making last-minute phone calls to her friends and associates in New York and Santo Domingo. While she talked, she distributed her purchases into various pockets of her purse and her carryon bag as if trying to hide something. Clara had left the radio off and driven in silence, eavesdropping on her sister. There were buried motives for everything Yunis did. There
was always an angle, always a scam, and Clara hoped to overhear something that would help her understand more fully what her sister was up to in running away to their mother's house and abandoning her daughter. From the beginning, the decision had seemed impulsive to Clara, but that was how it went with her sister. Plans were anathema. Yunis's cell phone conversations left Clara unilluminated. They were mostly business—making sure that the woman she'd sublet her apartment to was still planning to move in the next day and reminding Tío Modesto that he was supposed to pick her up at the airport. “I hope you got those Presidentes on ice, 'cause I'm thirsty already and I ain't even on the plane yet!” she said, switching off her phone.

They parked and found a cart to transfer Yunis's luggage into the airport. Entering the terminal, Clara felt it—the hollow chill of the place. Because they were late, there wasn't much of a line at the checkin. A family of panicked, abrasive Dominicans ahead of them were squabbling with the agent about the weight of their gargantuan bags. Meanwhile Yunis was delving again through the contents of her purse.

“I hate this e-ticket shit,” she said. “You remember when you used to get your ticket in a nice plastic wallet? Like a diploma or something? Now it's these fucking printouts.”

Every event in her sister's life was like a scene out of a
telenovela: Days of Our Yuniverse.
Maybe it really was best for everyone if she just went away.

“Here you are, you son of a bitch.” From her bag, Yunis pulled a crumpled piece of paper with the Yahoo! logo on top.

“You got your passport, Mami?” asked Deysei.

“Yeah. I got both. Dominican and American. Nobody's going to give me no trouble today. Where are they?” She rooted once more in her purse, as if to pull a loose thread from the lining. Her bag fell from her hands and spilled half its contents across the hard, shiny floor.

“Fuck!”

“Last call. Santo Domingo. Last call,” said one of the attendants behind the counter.

“Wait! That's me!” shouted Yunis. Clara and Deysei squatted down to help her gather her belongings. Clara picked up a lipstick, an envelope, and a photograph of a man she'd never seen before, a young Dominican in a muscle shirt and a black Yankees cap, palm trees in the background. Perhaps
he
was the real reason behind Yunis's departure. She handed the items to her sister, who was yelling, “Santo Domingo! Right here!”

Her luggage was checked and her boarding pass issued with alacrity. The attendants told her to hurry. They went down the escalator to the security gate, where the metal detectors and X-ray machines waited. There was no time for a prolonged goodbye, but en route from the check-in counters, Yunis had started crying.

“Oh, baby, are you going to be OK?” She clutched Deysei to her breast.

“
Yes,
Mami,” said Deysei.

“I'm not deserting you, baby. You know that, right? I'll come back the minute you need me. You look after my girl,” said Yunis to Clara, a pearl-sized tear bubbling out of the corner of her eye.

“I will. Now go. Your flight is about to take off.”

“I'll call you from Mami's. Tonight. Bye
mi amorcita.
” She kissed her daughter and her sister and hustled toward the TSA workers, her big booty shaking, her curls bouncing. They watched her remove her shoes and pass through the metal detectors. On the far side, reunited with her bags, she waved at them and raced away.

“Tía?” said Deysei, a moment later.

“What?” said Clara, with more abruptness than she intended. The day's events had left her feeling testy.

“I hope you won't be mad at me.”

“What is it? Just tell me.”

She hesitated. “I'm hungry.”

“Oh, is that all?” said Clara, softening her voice. “How could I be mad at you? You've got to feed that baby. There's the food court over there. What do you feel like?”

Deysei looked abashed.

“What is it, honey? You can tell me.”

“A Big Mac, Tía.”

“You want a Big Mac?”

“Yes, Tía.”

Clara smiled, genuinely tickled. “That's funny.”

“What?”

“Big Macs were all I wanted to eat when I was pregnant with Guillermo. I just couldn't get enough of that special sauce. I must have eaten a hundred of them during those nine months. Poor Thomas. They got to know him pretty well at the twenty-four-hour drive-thru on Northfield.”

“I'm just hungry, Tía,” said Deysei, clearly reluctant to dwell on the procreative bond with her aunt. “It's not like it's a craving or nothing.”

“That's what you're saying now. Just wait. Pretty soon, you won't be able to think of anything but Big Macs. You'll be dreaming about them.” The memory elevated her mood. No matter what the damn doctors said about her uterus, she had given birth to a healthy boy who was alive and well and busy in the world—probably getting off his school bus right about now.

Clara left her niece at a table by the window in the food court and went to the McDonald's counter. She still felt overfed from their lunch at Church's. Watching the petulant, poorly paid staff assemble her niece's meal, she thought that fast food never looked less appetizing. She couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten a Big Mac. Years. During the second pregnancy—the lost baby—her foods of choice 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.