Pipe Dream by Solomon Jones

the door.
    “Don’t say nothin’,” Black said to Leroy and Pookie, just as his old classmate Clarisse Williams started to unlock the door.
    “Hey, Ever . . .”
    A smile quickly faded from her lips as she opened the door and saw three of them standing at her front door.
    “I told you never to bring anyone to my home, Everett,” she said, her eyes darting quickly to her left and then to her right, trying to see if her neighbors were looking out their windows.
    Clarisse was so afraid that someone would learn that she, a registered nurse, was smoking crack, she just knew the world could see her every time she got ready to take a blast. She was, after all, the type of woman people watched. She was all soft curves and luminous chocolate-brown skin, with full lips and a rounded nose set beneath eyes that slanted over high cheekbones. Yet her beauty was overlapped with something else—a simmering attitude that gave hard edges to the curves and a dark tint to her chocolate glow.
    “Good night, Everett,” Clarisse said, trying to hide her paranoia behind a stern mask that was meant to tell Black that he was no longer welcome in her home.
    But as she began to close the door, she took on a look that seemed to depict a struggle between two separate people— the one who was a principled, respectable, professional young woman, and the one who was smoking the pipe.
    “I’ll give you a bundle,” Black said, reading her expression and taking a chance that the crack fiend would win the struggle.
    The door stopped in midswing.
    “A bundle?” she said.
    He nodded.
    Clarisse looked at Leroy and Pookie again, hesitated, then opened the door wide, motioning for them to go back to the dining room.
    “Thank you,” Leroy said, and limped through the living room, looking at the gray three-piece leather living room set and the big-screen television that sank down into thick burgundy pile carpeting.
    “Thank you,” Pookie said, her normally brash and arrogant voice barely audible as she tagged behind Leroy.
    As Black tried to come in, Clarisse stopped him at the door and held out her hand. He looked at her, considered giving her half a bundle, then reached into his inside pocket and gave her one of the three and a half bundles Pop Squaly had paid him for the microwave, the drill, and the saws. As she looked to make sure there were twenty caps in the plastic baggy, she stepped aside and let him pass, closing and locking the door behind him.
    “Don’t sit down!” Clarisse yelled as she turned to walk through to her dining room, still counting the caps. But it was too late. Pookie was already sitting on one of the heavily cushioned beige chairs that surrounded the rosewood dining table.
    “Look, Clarisse,” Black said before she passed through the portal that led to the dining room. “We won’t be here long, I just—”
    “You got that right,” she said, cutting him off and making him feel small in a way that only a sister could. “You won’t be here long. And . . .”
    Her mouth dropped open as she stopped in the doorway and watched Leroy sit down, squirming in pain as he tried to adjust himself—the oil from his jeans rubbing off onto her beige chair covers.
    “I know you’re not rubbing oil in my chair,” she said, and Leroy tried to jump up, but fell down when his swelled knee buckled under the full weight of his body.
    Clarisse walked over to him—her scowl replaced by the concerned, gentle countenance of a nurse—and removed Leroy’s hand from his knee. With her fingertips, she touched his knee on either side. When she did, Leroy winced.
    “What happened to you?” Clarisse asked as Pookie walked over to Leroy and touched his forehead with a tenderness she had never displayed before.
    “It’s a long story,” he said, dumping a cap into his straight shooter and holding out his hand with his thumb and forefinger extended. “Gimme two.”
    “Can’t you wait a minute?” Clarisse said. “Your knee’s