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Which is why I’m surprised when he comes home one afternoon from some kind of practice session and lays into me.

“Damn it, Red.” He stalks around the room picking up random crap I’ve tossed aside. Reefer butts and empty bottles and I don’t know what all.

“What’s the beef, man?”

“I didn’t come get you so you could lie around the house smoking reefer all day,” Shorty says.

“When’d you get so uptight?”

“’Round about the time you stopped paying rent.”

I shrug, reaching for the cash in my pocket. “How much do I owe you?”

He tells me and I blanch. Like he’s thrown cold water on me. “It went up that much?”

Shorty looks at me slant, the way he often looks at me now. Like he no longer likes me, like we’re no longer brothers. “No. It’s been that long. It adds up.”

“OK, man,” I tell him. I hold up my hands. I drop the attitude with him, now that I can see good and clear that I’m in the wrong. “I’ll find some work.”

There is always a hustle to be had. Time to get up off the couch. Time for Detroit Red to find a stake in Roxbury.

First stop, of course, is always the Roseland. Easy hustles. Tonight I just figure I’ll get the lay of the land.

The music intoxicates me, like always. It’s been ages since I Lindy-Hopped or danced at all. I’ve been running, stepping in all directions lately. The real-life hustle. Haven’t needed the dance floor, I guess.

Tonight I walk the floor, letting the old Lindy ways soak back into my skin.

Plenty of pretty ladies on the floor, of course, but one in particular catches my attention. The way she moves is familiar. Lyrical and light. So familiar. Could it actually be . . . ?

“Laura?”

Haunted, hollow eyes. They widen. “It’s you.”

“It’s you,” I echo, slightly unbelieving.

“I heard you went to Harlem,” she says.

“Did. I’m back now.” I gaze at her, trying to get over how different she looks.

“Oh.” She wears a cream-colored dress, with small shoulder caps, a low-cut front, and a short, thin, gauzy skirt. She’s not quite ragged but seems to me barely clothed, at least compared to the high-necked blouses, cardigans, and long skirts she used to wear back when I knew her.

“I’m surprised to see you here.” By now she should have finished college and moved into a big house on the Hill, making her own way and trying out the newest of the new fur hats, like Ella.

“You brought me down the Hill,” she says. “I guess I never made it back up.”

“College?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I thought that it would be easy. That if I worked hard, I could move to bigger and better things. But the system’s not made for people like us.” I’ve never heard her sound so bitter. “You were right about a lot of things.”

“What does your grandmother think of all this?” She was always so strict. I can’t imagine her letting Laura come down to the Roseland every night.

“She’s too old to say anything about it,” Laura says. “And there’s no one else to stop me. My daddy left me. Seems like everyone’s always leaving.”

I don’t want to think about that. Don’t want to feel guilty. Just want to lose myself in the music. “You wanna dance?” I ask her. “Old times’ sake?”

Out on the floor, the awkwardness fades some. We blurt and babble. She’s drunk and I’m high — it lets us relax, keeps the conversation light.

“What are you doing now?”

“This,” she answers. “You?”

“Oh, you know.” I shrug, and she nods, like it means something.

We dance easy, like we used to. But the way she looks at me is different. I’ve seen that look on girls before.

Laura spins close after a while, like I hoped she might, but she says nothing. My arms go around her, and we just move.

Holding her now makes me inexplicably sad. Not the way it used to, when she was a person so far out of reach, when she talked about things that seemed too high to touch.

The place she holds in my memory is a place where all things were possible. A place I had to walk away from because of the reality of life. I realize now, though, that I thought it would always be there. Laura as she was still lives in my mind. Or she did, until tonight.

Yet another long-held vision shatters. I’m running out of room to hold the pieces. My heart is full to aching.

“I missed you,” Laura whispers. “Almost always.”

“Me, too.” I haven’t thought about her in an eon. But I miss her now. Just because she’s here.

“We had something, didn’t we?”

Had. Had and lost. Had and threw away.

She’s still so beautiful. I guess I knew she was beautiful all along, but somehow along the way, I stopped seeing her. Decided that Sophia was the kind of woman I was looking for. Looking down at Laura now, I’m not sure how that happened.

She swings in and out, so far. Our hands never release, as if she doesn’t want to let go yet. Doesn’t want it to be over, even though there’s nothing more that can happen. We’ve had all we’re ever going to have together. This is all that we’re ever going to be.

Count Basie’s beats jump through the speaker.

Our feet fly, fingers intertwined. Laura is as light to lead as ever.

It’s almost like before. Almost exactly, and yet the ways it’s not are more than enough to ruin any hint of perfection. Laura used to be perfect, too. Did I ruin her?

Nothing to do but just keep moving, keep stepping. Don’t stop, or it’ll catch you. If it catches you, it’s over, the dance is done, and there’s nothing left but to lie down and close your eyes. So just keep moving.

Boston, 1945

Sophia doesn’t mind loaning me some coin until I get a new hustle going. “Get straight with Shorty,” she says. “Don’t even worry about it.” So I don’t. I take hold of the snaking fur stole around her shoulders and draw her close. The fur is soft and plush. Elegant. It reminds me how much Sophia has and how much I still don’t. Even in the middle of our kiss, I can’t forget it.

“How many of these you got?” I ask her, rubbing the fur.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe a dozen.”

To me, one looks pretty much interchangeable with the next. “They must be expensive.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t pay for most of them.”

I let go. “He buys them for you?” It bothers me to think of her wearing gifts from her husband when she’s with me. It’s easier to imagine she’s mine and mine alone when there’s no specific tie to anything else, no reminders of black and white.

“Don’t pout,” she purrs, pressing against me. “I got them myself.”

“How, exactly?”

She tosses her hair in a familiar, delightful way. “I have very rich friends, you know. Some of them have two or three dozen furs gathering dust in a closet.” She pantomimes plucking something, like fruit. “They never miss one or two.”

I laugh. “You little minx,” I whisper. Truly, we are a perfect match.

“My little minks,” she teases, fluffing the fur at me.

“They never miss them, eh?”

“Not a bit,” she purrs, leaning over me. “My sister and I have been doing it for years. You want in?”

“You have a sister?” I probably should have known that. But we don’t talk about things like home and family.

“Little sister.”

“She as much trouble as you?” I breathe.

Sophia laughs throatily. She leans her cheek against me. “You like my furs? Plenty more where those came from. We’d be able to carry a lot more if you came with us.”

“I can’t go to those fancy parties.” What is she thinking?

“No, at night,” she says. “While everyone is away for the holidays. Easy money.”

The idea plants itself in my brain like a seed. “A lot of it?”

Sophia nods, but with her face so close to mine, we both lose interest in talking. I let her enfold me, but my mind ticks around the sprouting idea. We may have just found ourselves a new stake. A fresh hustle, with nothing up front and a whole lot of cash on the back end.

I hand Shorty a wad of cash to cover the rent. He takes it without comment. He knows better than to ask where it came from, I suppose, especially since he seems to be living on the up-and-up for the moment.

I’m ready to change that. Sophia and I stayed up late working it all out. We figure the return will be much better if we don’t try to go it alone. Sophia’s going to talk to her sister, and I’m going to talk to Shorty. He’s my best friend and roommate; we don’t have secrets. Of course I’m going to bring him in.

“Let me bend your ear about something, man.”

“What’s that?” he says.

“Sophia and her sister — did you know she has a sister?”

Shorty shakes his head no.

“Anyway, they have an in, casing houses in nice areas. Suburbs, outside the city.”

“Casing, as in to rob the places?”

“Yeah,” I confirm. “Real nice places. Furs. Jewelry and silver. Expensive things, man.”

“OK . . .” He’s not shutting me down.

“With the holidays coming up, some of them are going out of town. Sophia knows when. The houses will just be sitting there, empty. All that rich stuff inside.”

It isn’t exactly a hustle, but it’s a pretty good plan. Almost impossible to resist, as far as I’m concerned.

Shorty considers. Gears turning in his head; it’s almost audible. Paying gigs don’t pay so well. Reeds and pads and sheet music cost money, plus he’s been saving forever for a new, better saxophone. “Listen, Red,” he says finally.

“I’m listening,” I tell him.

“Are you?” He pins me with a look.

“Yeah, man.” I don’t like this new, skeptical side of Shorty. The one who looks at me with distance in his eyes, like I’m some strange foreign thing.

“If we’re gonna do this, you gotta stay straight,” Shorty warns me. “You can’t be getting so high you fall down on the job. You know?”

“Sure, sure,” I promise him, knowing I can perfectly well work high and not show it. I’m twenty years old now, and I’ve been doing it for years.

Unlike Sophia, her sister is dark-haired, and right away it’s pretty clear that Shorty would like to get cozy with her. He fantasizes about being with a white woman, but I don’t know that he ever has. It’ll probably work out for him this time. These white girls like to have fun with Negro men.

Together, the four of us outline the scheme in more detail. Our plan is pretty brilliant, if I do say so. We’ll go to the neighborhoods Sophia and her sister know, targeting particular houses when people are on vacation.

“Holiday ski trips and visits to the in-laws,” Sophia says. “Sometimes they’re gone a week or two.”

“How do you know when they’re away?”

“There are ways to tell,” Sophia says. “We listen at parties; people talk about their plans. Ask neighbors to watch their pets.”

Sophia’s sister also has a job as a makeup salesgirl, door-to-door. The girls can visit nice houses that way, and if they’re invited in, see who’s packed to go out of town. See what they have that looks valuable.

It’s foolproof.

We drive west of the city into Brookline, to an area where the streets widen and the trees thicken and the houses grow bigger and more spaced apart.

The houses are fancy. Far nicer than the homes downtown. Perfect white snow-covered lawns, with manicured bushes and trimmed trees. Holiday lights twinkle from eaves and railings and porch columns. Like diamonds. If each house holds a diamond for every light outside, we’ll never have to work another day in our lives.

Sophia takes us to a dead-end street with five houses splayed around a circle. She clicks the headlights off and drives slowly.

“That one,” she says, pointing one house down. “They’re away until the New Year.”

Shorty and I bend our heads to look through the windshield. It’s a two-story brick house with black clapboard shutters and a trio of narrow cement stairs leading to the front door.

“There’s a kitchen door around there.” Sophia indicates the left side of the house. “It doesn’t have a deadbolt.”

“OK,” Shorty says. He pats the pocket where he’s stashed his new lock-picking tools.

I put my hand on the door handle, ready and waiting. Shorty opens his door, and the first slice of winter cuts through the car. I open my door and follow him into the dark. The little light in the car ceiling is off, so there’s only the dark — and the cold. It’s terribly, terribly cold. Colder than the act of breaking in and blindly robbing some fat cat during his vacation. Cold enough to numb me to any hesitation or doubt.

“Wait for me on the porch,” Shorty says. “I’ll let you in.” He diverts off the path, feet disappearing into the drifting clouds of white. He hurries around the side of the house as I climb the front steps.

Nothing to do but stand there for a minute. I try to stomp the chill out of my shoes. Tuck my collar closer. Glance back at the girls, sitting in the dark car. A plume of exhaust billows from the tailpipe. Gotta have a getaway plan, of course.

The door creaks open. Shorty grins at me. “Well, come on in,” he says. “Nice of you to stop by.”

I push past him to get into the relative warmth of the house. It’s easy to tell no one’s been home for a few days. The heat’s off. But being inside still blocks the wind and cuts the sharpness of the weather.

We’re standing in a wood-paneled foyer that’s filled corner to corner with framed family photographs. I drop one handle of the loot sack off my shoulder. Straight ahead are the stairs and what looks like a hallway to the kitchen. To the left and right, various formal-looking sitting rooms full of straight-backed chairs and all manner of couches. There’s a grand piano in one and a fireplace in the other. Lacy throws draped here and there. Knickknacks on the table.