Clara Lugo grew up in the Dominican neighborhood at the far northern reaches of Manhattan in a home that would have rattled the most grounded of children. Through brains and determination, she has slipped the bonds of her confining ethnic neighborhood and lives a quiet, professional life with her American husband and son in the suburbs of New Jersey--often thwarted by her constellation of relatives who don't always understand Clara's gringa ways. But Clara's past catches up with her--most notably in the person of Tito: Clara's handsome high school boyfriend from fifteen years earlier. Something has interfered with Tito's early adulthood. He's an incomplete man who increasingly feels cursed. He carries a torch for Clara; Clara harbors a secret from Tito. Their meeting sets in motion an unraveling in both of their lives--an unraveling that reveals what the cost of assimilation--or absence of it--has been for each of them. This immensely entertaining debut poses the question, does a striving child of immigrants have to sever ties with the past in order to move on? and answers it with wit and compassion.