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

revelations, she took the bus to Orange High between job interviews, in the middle of the school day. There, she stood on the sidewalk on South Orange Avenue and looked up the short rise to the building that she’d entered every day for four years in the mid-1960s. Aside from the food service supervisor program she’d attended after Skeet’s arrest, this had been the last place she’d gone toschool. Jackie was forty-four years old; high school had been a quarter century ago. The place looked different now, and not simply because of the profane graffiti sprayed across its walls. It appeared to her that those hundreds of kids perched on the steps and leaning out of windows and milling around the yellowed lawn were training not for college or jobs but for their destiny as loiterers, hustlers, and single mothers. Jackie felt very old in that moment. But the natural question—what had happened to twenty-six years?—occurred to her only once, fleetingly, because its answer was obvious. Her son had happened. Many of her decisions had turned out poorly, many of her circumstances were more precarious now than they’d ever been, and most of her dreams had fragmented. But her son remained, and he was bright and he was strong and he loved her to world’s end. Jackie understood now, looking at her old high school, that she would never leave this place, Orange, like most of her siblings had. She was part of the asphalt fabric on which she stood. She also understood that, with a few more years of determination and sacrifice on her part, Rob would leave. He would do so in spectacular fashion. She could almost— almost— visualize it, through the massive outlay of effort that sat between this stark moment and that prescient one.
    A few weeks later, Jackie found a job with a health care company that managed hundreds of nursing homes and posthospital rehabilitation centers around the country. She was placed in the food service department at the Summit Ridge Center, in West Orange. The job was a demotion from management back to kitchen work, but her employer pitched itself as a strong company in an expanding field with room to grow, and all these terms appealed to Jackie, who’d never had experience with a single one. She enjoyed riding the bus daily west toward the suburbs rather than east toward the city—to see her neighborhood open up and give way to fields and woods and ranch homes sprawling across half-acre plots along Route 501, to see where all those former neighbors she’d grown up with had moved during the ’70s while the Peace family had stayed put.
    The work starting out was worse than the hospital, and the kitchen had a hierarchy—of which she started on the bottom rung—that was jolting, having come from a place where coworkers generally tried tohave fun and help each other by sharing car rides, covering shifts, being interested in the lives around them. She had a hard time falling in with the big-corporation cost-consciousness that led to her cooking food for the patients that she would never let her own family eat. But she was able to transfer Rob back to Mt. Carmel.
    Christmas that year was very thin. Jackie could manage no more than some homemade baked goods and stocking stuffers. Rob didn’t seem to mind; he told her that he considered the used bike, which she’d bought him last spring, to be like an early Christmas present, plus the encyclopedias (Jackie had gotten up to the G volume before losing her job). A few of her siblings came home for the holiday to sit in the living room with Horace and Frances. The house had been feeling too quiet lately, hollow in a way, and Jackie missed the chorus of arguments that used to resonate through the halls and stairways. She was worried that without anyone to engage him at home while she was working, Rob would reach farther and farther outward for stimulation, to people and locales where she had less control, if any