The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs Page A

converged. And Sharpe James was the standard-bearer.
    Jackie was surprised when her son suddenly began watching the news, just to hear what the mayor said. In fifth grade, he composed a biography of him. He asked her to take him to speeches downtown, which were held whenever Mayor James cleared a lot for a new office building or appropriated money to hire more police officers.
    She didn’t know what the term “surrogate father” meant exactly, but years later she would agree—“Mm-hmm, I suppose that’s right”—when asked if Sharpe James might have been Rob’s first.

    W ITH SCHOOL TUITION effectively canceling out the pay raise Jackie had obtained, and with Skeet no longer contributing to the day-to-day, Rob saw how she struggled. There were, as ever, the constant night shifts. There were the ramen noodles and cans of beans and bags of rice in the cupboard. There were the increasing arguments at home about who was responsible for what share of annual property taxes, roughly $3,500 per year. There was Jackie’s contracting social life and the beeline she made for her bedroom upon returning home from work, where she immediately fell asleep. There were the aunts and uncles and cousins he’d grown up with who, in steady succession, left New Jersey for better opportunities in Ohio, Florida, Atlanta, or elsewhere in northern NewJersey (of Frances and Horace’s nine children and five grandchildren, only Jackie and Rob remained on Chapman Street). There was the decade of age Jackie had on the mothers of almost all his friends, and in the latter half of that decade a doubling of the financial and emotional burden she carried. Though she hadn’t wanted to marry Skeet, and though he hadn’t left them intentionally, the aura of abandonment intractably clung to her.
    Despite the attachment he felt to his father, Rob came to scorn abandonment above all things, and as he turned eleven and fifth grade began, he aggressively assumed the role of husband to his mother. She would find dinner plates covered with foil in the fridge when she got home late, leftovers of whatever Rob had cooked for himself that night. Sometimes she would wake up around midnight, after a few hours’ sleep, and he would be in the rocking chair beside her bed, reading. He began working odd jobs on weekends for people he knew through his father—raking leaves, shoveling snow, painting—for a few dollars per gig. Always, he divided these earnings and left half on the counter for his mother. If he made $6.50 over a weekend of helping move furniture, and his employer gave him an extra fifteen cents for a candy bar on the way home, Rob factored the tip into his wages, rounded up one cent, and left $3.33 for Jackie. He became competitive with himself, trying to earn more each week than he had the last. He could always find people in Skeet’s orbit to call on, always carve out additional hours with which to bring in money. He logged these earnings in a pocket-size notepad beside his bed, maintaining neat columns of what he’d made alongside what he wanted to make. Jackie let him do this not because she needed the money or didn’t want him to spend it on himself, but because she saw the feeling of empowerment that taking care of her gave him.
    Above all, whether at work or school or home with her, Rob strove to project confidence and strength while refusing to show weakness or insecurity. And Jackie wanted to stoke that quality, which she considered a greater embodiment of manhood than any football heroics or rap lyrics or fashion statements or even academic awards. Too, she didn’t have theheart to inform him that, however mature he may have felt, he was not yet the man of the house.
    But still she saw the anger in him, a gradually thickening shade just behind the sometimes impenetrable veil of his eyes. She knew that any anger could be dangerous, and that this particular variety, seeded so