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Play it cool. “I’m not the jealous sort of cat,” I tell Sophia. I remember how she liked that about me at the first dance. “You do what you do. I’ll do what I do. When we’re doing what we do and it happens to be us together, all the better.”

Sophia slides closer along the bench. “I knew you’d understand.”

I understand. I understand what it will take not to lose her.

My arms loop around her. While she’s here, on my street, in my reach, she’s mine and mine alone. I whisper, “You and me, baby. We’ve got to be free. I dig that.”

Then I grab her close. Smooth my fingers over her neck in the way she likes.

I kiss her passionately. Stamp myself on her, so she won’t soon forget. I might not be the only guy in her life — and probably not the oldest or the smartest or the richest or the best looking — but I’m bound and determined to be one of her favorites. The one who gets her. Who just lets her be. A no-hassles guy who twirls her and dips her and rocks her. The one she wants to come back to again and again.

I watch from the front stoop as Sophia drives off down the street. I linger, my breath fogging the air.

I’ve got a cold premonition that I know what’s waiting for me inside. It’s not very dark at all anymore. Surely she’s seen us. Surely she’s mad.

No choice but to step into it. It’s too cold, I’m too tired, and anyway, this is where I live.

Ella springs up from the sofa like her tail is on fire. “Are you serious with this?” she screeches. “A white woman? Lord,” she moans, “you are making one mess of your life.”

Yeah, that sounds like me.

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I say. Ella doesn’t have a problem with other couples mixing races. I know for a fact she has friends on the Hill who’ve done it.

“Wrong’s not the point,” Ella snaps. I stay quiet.

“That kind of woman is no good,” Ella says. “She’s loose. She’s dangerous.”

“She’s not,” I protest.

Ella shakes her head. Her whole body quakes, in fact. “She’s going to bring you trouble. You don’t even know the kind of trouble.”

I can’t pretend I don’t know. That I don’t understand.

In my mind’s eye, a shadow. Something swinging from a tree.

“It’s OK here,” I yell at her. “So get off my back!” Ella flinches in surprise at the volume of my voice. I’ve gone from silent to screaming in a matter of seconds. It’s just that I’m much too fried to have this fight. I’ve been up all night, dancing till my feet ached. They still ache. My fading reefer buzz is no longer enough to sustain me. Sophia has fallen out of my arms, her return uncertain, and all Ella wants is to rip her further away.

Ella launches into a lecture about the trouble I’m bound to get into, but I can’t stand to hear it.

“I’m going to bed,” I say over her. I don’t even wait for her to admonish me. Just walk off and stomp up the stairs.

Ella shouts after me.

I don’t care. I keep on climbing.

“I can’t take it anymore,” I tell Shorty. “Every tiny thing I do, she’s got something to say about it.” I pace through his living room. It’s not a large place. I go corner to corner to corner. I’ve got a route all worked out, dodging the sofa and chairs, skirting around the folding table that Shorty calls the dining room.

“Red, man.” Shorty’s been listening to me rant for going on an hour now. He talks around the toothpick he’s been gnawing on. “Your sister’s just doing what women do.”

“Half-sister,” I correct.

“Uh-huh.” Shorty fingers his sax. At some point, he must’ve pulled it out of the case. He’s done this before, practicing scales or something while we’re talking. Calls it being efficient. The keys make little clicking sounds.

I pace. The boards creak in certain places.

“‘Opportunity’ this, and ‘expectation’ that. But then every other word is ‘you can’t, you can’t.’” I throw my arms out. “Who does she think she is?”

“Your mama,” Shorty quips.

“Well, she’s not.” I bark it at him, glaring fierce. Mom is locked up right now, for being strong and proud and, heck, for being exactly what Ella wants me to be. “Opportunity” and “expectation” got Mom locked up. Got Papa killed. And Ella still wants to preach? I don’t have to listen. “She’s
not
my mother!”

Shorty’s brows go up, but he looks down, away. “I know, homeboy. I know.” He’s got his quiet voice on.

I pull the comb out of my back pocket. Run it through my conk. Take a second to pull myself together.

“Maybe it’s nice,” Shorty says. “Having someone around who looks after you.”

“Maybe it’s a pain in the butt.”

Shorty shrugs. He’s slouched all crooked on the couch, one leg bent up, the sax splayed across him. “You gotta take the good with the bad on a thing like that.”

I can’t see any good, and I say so.

“She cooks good, right?” We’ve had Shorty over to dinner a time or two. Ella isn’t much of a fan of his, either. I can’t do a damn thing right, far as she’s concerned. Not even make friends. She hates Shorty. Hates Sophia. She liked Laura the one time she met her, and I can see why. They’re cut from the same righteous Hill cloth. The kind I want to shred with my teeth.

“Yeah, she cooks.”

“That’s a big deal,” Shorty goes on. “Having food put on the table for you.”

The food is nice. But I can eat some at Townsend’s. And anyway, I can get by with less. When you’ve lived on dandelion greens, everything is uphill from that.

“Nah. I’m getting out of there.”

“You sure?”

“Heck, yeah.” I’ll sleep in the back room at the Roseland if they’ll let me.

Shorty sighs. “Well, here’s something you might want to know.”

“What?”

“My cousin’s moving out,” Shorty says. “I’ve got a bed open and half the rent to account for.”

I perk up. “Oh, yeah?”

“You interested?”

Interested? I’m falling all over myself as I stop pacing long enough to collapse in one of the chairs. “Heck, yes.”

“You gotta be good for half the rent. Every week.”

“I can cover it.”

“Toilet runs. You gotta jiggle the handle.”

“Sure.” I’m on the edge of my seat.

Shorty moves the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “Yours if you want it.”

“How soon?”

“Starting next week.”

“I’m in.” Couldn’t have been more perfect.

Shorty studies me. “You sure? You gotta think twice before you ditch a good home like you’ve got going now.”

“It ain’t home,” I tell him straight up. “Ain’t nothing like it.” But I take the second to think. Only because he’s making me; I already know. Live with Shorty, my best pal? In our own place? No sneaking in and out? No having to answer to anyone about where I’ve been or what I’ve been smoking or who I’ve been seeing? Only options, no rules? There isn’t a single thing to second-guess about it.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I tell him. We slap palms. Done deal.

My bags are packed and stacked beside the door. Ella motions me in and hugs me. I stiffen in the circle of her arms. She releases me.

“You don’t have to go,” Ella says.

But I do.

“I haven’t been happy with some of your choices, but we’re still family.” In our last week, Ella has been all the things she ever was. Wise and warm and willing to hold me close.

“Thanks for bringing me here,” I say, and I mean it. I’d be crushed dead by now, stuck in my old sadness, if I’d had to stay back in Mason. Boston has made me a new man, and Ella was the first doorway out of that past.

There are new doorways opening now. And the new me is going to walk through them.

“I don’t know what you see in him,” she says of Shorty. “Are you really going to live with him? I just don’t like that man.”

I laugh. “You don’t like anyone,” I say. It’s OK to laugh together now. Now that what we’ve shared is ending.

“Seems that way, huh?” She strokes my face. “I like you.”

That doesn’t seem very true at this point. Ella likes the old me. The Little me. Now I’m Red.

I feel like a man, out in the world finally, with my own pad. I lie in Shorty’s cousin’s bedroom — my bedroom — taking it all in.

The vibe here is different. It’s all Shorty and me, like we are. No one to answer to. No fine furniture to keep unmussed.

The first time I check the mail, I get a shock. All the bills are addressed to “Malcolm Jarvis.”

“Hey,” I tell Shorty. “They gave me your last name.”

“That’s me,” he says. “I’m Malcolm, too.”

“Really?” All this time, I’ve never known him by any name other than Shorty. I guess I knew it was a street name, but at the same time, it seemed like he’d always had it. “That’s some kind of fluke.”

Shorty just shrugs. “Things happen for a reason.”

“No reason I can think of for a thing like that.” Two Malcolms, both from Lansing? Maybe Shorty and I were meant to be friends.

We eat off thick, chipped ceramic plates. Drink from mugs stained in blotches or in rings, brown from coffee and red from wine. No fine, fancy china like Mom’s or Ella’s.

“This is good,” I tell Shorty one night, scraping my plate clean. It’s some kind of beef stew. He made an enormous pot of it, enough to feed us for a week.

“You think?” he says. “All right.”

“Over-the-top delicious,” I say, going in for another scoop. “What’s the secret?”

“It’s just beef and vegetables, salt and water. And a ham hock.”

I slow my eating. Ham hock? “There’s pork in this? In a beef stew?”

Shorty shrugs. “My mom always put a ham hock in everything. The bone flavors the broth, and you don’t have to put in as much meat. Meat’s expensive.”

I rub my tongue on the roof of my mouth as if to clean it. My whole life, I never ate a bite of pork. I thought I wasn’t supposed to. Mom said God put it on earth to eat the garbage and it wasn’t made for human consumption. But I can’t think of any good reason to hold to that rule now.

“Ham hock, eh?” I bring the spoon to my lips again. Pork. I didn’t know what I was missing. This stew might very well be the best-tasting thing I’ve ever had my mouth around. “Tastes like freedom,” I tell Shorty.

He laughs. “You better learn to cook something, too. Freedom gets old after a while.”

“So where are we going tonight?” I ask.

“Tonight I’m getting together with some other cats to jam a little,” he says. “Count me out.” Turns out my impression of Shorty as always out in the street isn’t quite accurate. He has a lot going on. I’m the free one, the one without a care.

“Come on, man,” I groan. “Didn’t you just jam with them the other night?”

“We’re hoping to catch a gig together soon,” he explains. “We’re getting pretty good.”

“Maybe I’ll catch up with you later?”

“Maybe.” Once he gets to playing, it’s hard to tear him away.

Shorty has all these goals and plans, and it starts to seem that those things are bogging him down. Can’t go out Tuesday night — got a saxophone lesson. Can’t buy another bag of reefer — gotta pay for the lesson. He has a boring kind of drive underneath him. I guess all along he’s been showing me this one side of him, letting me think it was his all. The way it’s mine.

He stands up to clear the table. “Call Sophia,” he tells me. “It’s not like you’ll be bored.”

“Yeah, I will.” Call her, that is.

Sophia comes around more often these days. Now that I have my own place, I can bring her inside. That raises my stock for her more than a little.

She has plenty of money to burn. We drink and smoke our way through it. I don’t even need to keep my slave at Townsend’s. Now that I don’t have Ella looking over my shoulder, I can work anyplace I want. Or not.

Boston, December 1941

I haven’t missed the job at Townsend’s for a second. But I’m missing credit payments left and right, and I still have to make rent, so I catch a slave at the Parker House, a big restaurant downtown. I have to wear a white coat, but I’m not a server. I carry trays of dirty dishes from the dining room back into the kitchen so the dishwashers can spray and scrub them clean.

It’s a mindless kind of work — no need for grinning and cheerful chatter to please the customers. I keep my head down, move the trays. Even though I’m back to dishwashing again, it’s still a step up in the world from Lansing.

Every free minute, I spend with Sophia. It never gets old, taking her around the Roxbury night spots. We always turn heads. She’s with me almost every night now; every night we take some dance floor by storm.

I wake up late for work, running on maybe three hours’ sleep. It’s a Sunday, and last night the dance went until all hours. I rub my eyes and kick myself into gear. By the time I get there, I’ll be so late they’ll probably fire me.

I hurry toward the Parker House, hoping I can get downtown and into the kitchen before they notice me missing and penalize me for being late. Not likely.

I burst in the door, only to find the main kitchen entirely empty. It shocks me into stillness. No dishes getting washed. Food laid out in pans on the fired-up stove, getting burned. The sharp smell of overdone meat starting to stink up the room.

Where is everybody?

From the back I can hear voices, so I follow the sound. I move through the kitchen, around the corner to the head chef’s office. The door’s open.