did she ever threaten to do that? yeah, many times. we d do something wrong, and she would say, well, you stop doing that or i m going to send you off to geri s house. and so they lived a life of packing up and fleeing state to state, one flop house to the next, searching for the cheapest place to stay and then skip out of. hunger constant. medical care, nonexistent. when money ran out, as it often did, shirley drove to the nearest truck stop. the girls would bed down in the car and watch shirley sneak off to do well, they didn t know. and alone and frightened, they held on to each other and watched the shadows of strange men pass by their car until the night when, terrified and unable to sleep, renee followed shirley. she s taking a long time and i m getting scared because i m thinking she left or she s died or something. so i go into where they work on the cars, and she s like on the
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renee, now 19, got on with life, moved in with her boyfriend. soon pepper showed up at their apartment, homeless and nowhere else to turn to. and everywhere pepper went from then on, shirley s poison gift followed. because of that woman and what she did, pepper was officially, at least, a nonperson. so it took a little while for determination to come back. she was in her mid-20s, a single mother by then. if only she could find her birth certificate. that could lead her to her parents. anyway, she needed documents to live. she needed a passport. so she contacted state offices. their departments of vital records with perhaps predictable results. tell me what it feels like when you know you have to go to an official and ask for something that you really, really, really need and you kind of know, you think how it s going to go. i get emotional usually. i usually cry.
as shirley explained to strangers that she was their grandmother. that their parents had been killed in a car accident. i knew that everything that was happening to us was completely wrong at a very, very young age. why had she been taken? she didn t know. not for money, certainly. there were no ransom demands. and without pepper s birth certificate, shirley couldn t use her to score public assistance. though she did use renee that way. frightened, compliant renee, eager for a mother s love, even if that mother figure was shirley. i never wanted to do anything wrong. i felt like if i did something wrong or whatever, she wouldn t love me. she would give me away. wouldn t love me? shirley told her, says renee, she was born to a prostitute drug addict named geri. that shirley saved baby renee, raised her as a daughter. but kept renee in line by threatening to abandon her.
shirley had been her friend, she said. told her about a woman working in the sex trade named geri smith who didn t want her babies. and one day shirley showed up at barbara s house with a 3-month-old baby she called rhonda patricia smith. barbara could see it was a little iffy but she wanted that baby so badly. and so she said she ignored the red flags. nope, didn t care. didn t really care. she was going to see to it, she said, that rhonda was loved and cared for by the best parents she could ever possibly have. bob and barbara legally adopted their little princess four years later in the fall of 1973. and it was shortly after that, said barbara, when shirley and renee showed up at her door. and the kids played together, and we visited together, and she asked if rhonda could come spend the night with renee.