relatives had migrated and where they’d found good-paying jobs at a Kraft Heinz factory. The couple stayed up much of the night, talking. Robert pleaded with Erin to leave with him. What he didn’t tell her is that a few days earlier, he’d been shot at, and he was afraid.
The last memory that I have of Robert, it was Nani’s last day of school. They were having a party and they asked us to get some snacks and so we went to the store. And then we snuck back to my house, and, uh…
Erin looks towards the ceiling, shaking her head, as if she’s sharing this inside joke with everyone, as if to say, You know Robert. She laughs awkwardly.
Robert was just holding me so close—telling me how tired he was and how he wanted to just leave Chicago and he wanted me to pack my stuff and go with him. And I told him no. And he said he wanted to come home and I told him no, because the streets was just torn between us. And I told him I liked my plain life, and he just couldn’t understand that, that money didn’t make me happy. And then I was sitting in my car and my friend just texted me and Robert just flared up and jumped up out his car. He told me I couldn’t have nobody playing with me and I said, “Robert, you’re not my man,” and he said, “I’m always your man.” We laughed. That was the last time I saw Robert or spoke to Robert.
Robert was killed the next day. While he was sitting in his car with a friend, someone walked up and shot him through the window. Erin insists that a friend set up Robert. After Erin delivered the eulogy, she walked from the podium, and her legs gave out from under her. A friend had to hold her up to keep her from folding over. She went out into the hot, humid air, where some men had unbuttoned their shirts to cool off. In the church’s parking lot, police officers made their presence felt as a police helicopter hovered overhead, not uncommon at funerals when they expect trouble. In the gaggle of people milling about, Erin noticed the friend who she believed had had something to do with Robert’s death, and so did Robert’s uncle, who is in his fifties. The uncle punched the friend, which led to a melee. The police dispersed the crowd before things escalated and then escorted Erin and her children to a waiting car. They headed to Mount Hope Cemetery, where—because so many murder victims are buried there—police search cars before they enter.
Erin told me that the last time she saw Robert, just the day before his death, she told him, I’m not one of those girls who gets excited [by this life]. I buried enough friends already. Her cousin had been killed just a year earlier. I like my boring life, she told him. Robert shot back, All you do is work, work, work. To which Erin replied, What else am I suppose to do?
Chapter 9
I Ain’t Going Nowhere, part one
JULY 8…JULY 9…JULY 10…
This morning Anita Stewart pulled up in front of Thomas’s house shortly before nine. Thomas’s house appeared to wobble as the blue tarp which covered a gap in the roof rustled in the morning breeze. It was hard for Anita to keep track of the abandoned properties up and down the block, sometimes as many as half a dozen, staggering like punch-drunk boxers, downstairs windows covered by sheets of warped plywood, upstairs windows knocked out, open to the elements. It felt like she was witnessing the remnants of a brawl; even the intact homes looked tired and worn. Add the residents and it was, to put it politely, a rowdy street. Earlier this month Thomas had told Anita to stop coming by. He forbid her, really. Though he wouldn’t say why, he clearly feared for her safety. Just a few weeks earlier, a forty-two-year-old man, Dwayne Duckworth, whom everyone called Duck, had been shot thirteen times coming out of his house. Thomas ran down the street to see why there was all this commotion. “I ain’t never seen so many holes,” he told me. “And when they put him on the stretcher, he was still breathing and he had a cigarette hanging from his mouth.” Duck didn’t make it. People whispered that it was over drugs. I’d been there once when