to tell a story. shirley had been her friend, she said. had 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
raised her as a daughter. but kept renee in line by threatening to abandon her. 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
she was my best friend growing up. that was my best friend. we did everything together. we fight like sisters. we did everything together. renee was feeling abandoned. i was telling her, don t go. stay here. i need you. you re my sister. so she went. she did her thing. and i was upset and sad. by 1986 and on her own now, pepper had all but given up hope that she d ever find her real parents. now she began to encounter a more immediate problem. the inevitable trouble that comes with having no real name, no birth certificate, no i.d. though she was enrolled in school under the name rhonda smith at shirley s urging, she had no way to prove this was her legal name, and without some cooperation from shirley, her search for such documents seemed hopeless. and then how did you find out that she was sick? she turned completely yellow when they diagnosed her with pancreatic cancer and she
on july 29th, 1986, at the age of 63. she was buried here, this cemetery, in an unmarked grave. 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
sleepover with new friend renee. instead the adult who brought her here, a woman named shirley, simply didn t take her home again. instead she packed some belongings, put the girls in the car and hit the road. where did they go? the little girl had no idea. but she did know that from now on, she had a new name. they called her pepper. pepper smith. she was not yet 5 years old. we lived in cars and motels and going from state to state staying at salvation armies to get a meal here and there. just what s it like to live in a car? it s horrible. it s embarrassing. she was confused, of course, and terribly frightened at first. she begged, take me home. shirley ignored her. she imagined running away. i had nowhere to go. i was too scared. then as the weeks and months and then years went by, as her powers of reasoning grew, the question grew, too. did her mother bobbie actually give her away?