by Dale Hudson
The Summey girls grew into their own personalities. The oldest of the two, Brandy, was always content and never cried. While Renee was a loving and very smart child, she was feisty and independent. Renee was forever wanting to do everything for herself, but the two sisters developed a strong bond and fortunately never fought or argued. Brandy didn’t mind being the quiet one and would always bow out to her younger, gregarious sister.
For some reason, Renee didn’t remember a lot about her childhood other than her father was the permissive, easygoing and laid-back parent. Her mother was the one who had to discipline her and her sister. Jack was self-employed by then and owned his own paint-and-body shop, while Marie worked mostly in clerical positions for physicians and health clinics. In 1990, her parents bought land in Clemmons, North Carolina, and Jack built a new body shop, then constructed his family’s log cabin home.
Renee’s most vivid memories in her life began when she was twelve years old and had just gone through puberty. She was attending Wiley Junior High, in Winston-Salem, and always had been a motivated student who did very well when she applied herself. With a natural ability for drawing she had inherited from her father, she excelled in art. Several of Renee’s art projects were sent off to art shows and to scholastic events and came back with high praise from the judges.
But Renee never felt comfortable around the other kids in her school. It was as if she never felt good enough, rich enough or privileged enough as the other children. She remembered other kids in the neighborhood began teasing her when she was in the fourth grade. Because she and her family lived in a mobile home, she said, her schoolmates would laugh at her for being poor. Said they’d call her and her sister, “white trailer trash.”
Renee had always been thin and small, which gave her classmates even more fodder for jokes. The other kids in school called her “Ethiopian” and taunted her about being skinny with names like “beanpole” or “light pole.”
After all this teasing, Renee started feeling insecure about who she was and where she lived. In order to compensate for her low self-esteem, she began hanging out with the wrong crowd—a bunch of misfits, just like her, from lower-class families and poor neighborhoods. She figured since her peers were already labeling her an outcast, she might as well be like them. Renee grew up thinking the rebellious crowd was where she really belonged.
One weekend, Renee was spending the night with a friend. She felt safe with this family, for they were friends with her parents, and one of their sons had visited Renee’s dad at his auto body shop from time to time. She didn’t know it, but the young man smoked pot, and since his sister was Renee’s friend, she felt that if she didn’t try it, then they would make fun of her. Renee smoked cigarettes, but this was the first time she had ever tried pot.
After they had smoked a joint, Renee’s friend left to go to the bathroom and never came back. Being so high from the pot, Renee wasn’t sure what was going on and ended up having sexual intercourse with her friend’s brother. She knew she didn’t like what was happening, but was confused. She couldn’t think straight. He had hurt her, but she didn’t know how to stop him. If she yelled, she might get into trouble for the pot they had just smoked, so she just let it happen. She prayed for it to be over with, but never said another word about it.
Renee was young and didn’t have the interpersonal skills to get out of the situation with her girlfriend’s brother. She thought she had done something wrong and she would ultimately get into trouble for it. A couple of times, the boy showed up at her dad’s shop when he wasn’t there, and he’d call for Renee to come out and he’d have sex with her. She was scared to say anything about it and afraid to tell on him, so she just went along with it.
It was then that Renee became very depressed and started skipping school. She started hanging out with the wrong crowd, drinking, smoking pot and sneaking out of the house to meet her friends. Usually she would ride around and get high or drunk with a few friends or meet her boyfriend in the park and make out for a little while.
Renee’s parents had no idea what had happened to their daughter and attributed her bad grades and behavioral changes to “teenage problems” and her new set of friends. Renee said it was no big deal and claimed all the “cool kids” she knew were behaving the same. It was common to just hang out, rarely do any kind of homework and routinely fail tests. Renee never told her parents she did it because she didn’t want to seem like a nerd and be an outcast from the in crowd.
Renee and her parents had many discussions about her behavior and they administered many types of discipline to try and correct the problems. Renee would always promise to do better, but never did. But never—by any stretch of the imagination—did she see herself as a bad girl. After all, it was the 1990s. There were much younger girls at her school that were already having sex and doing drugs. She only had smoked pot a few times and limited her sexual activities to only the boys she dated.
When Renee first met Brent seven years ago at RJ Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, she was a thin, mousy fourteen-year-old. She and a friend needed a ride home from school, and they were bumming a ride for another student as well. At the last moment, their friend saw Brent getting into his blue-and-white S15 pickup truck and asked if he would give them all a ride. Brent agreed, and the four of them found themselves crammed inside the cab of Brent’s pickup.
Renee thought Brent was cute and learned they had a lot in common. He, too, had grown up in a family whose men shared a love for motorcycles and cars and was obsessed with anything mechanical. The youngest of three children, he got along well with his older brother and sister. Renee thought he was adorable with his big, beautiful eyes, his full, soft lips and great smile. He had braces on his teeth and wore those little blue rubber bands on them. But all the kids did that; it was the popular thing to do. When Brent agreed to give them a ride home, she was as excited as a first grader with a new bicycle.
At age seventeen, Brent was so much more mature than the boys in her class and the next day he found her in the hall at school and asked her out. Their relationship took off like a rocket. They were so affectionate and drawn to each other that they couldn’t keep their hands off one another. It took only a week of dating before they had engaged in their first sexual experience.
Renee recalled the first time she and Brent made love was kinda funny, because they were so nervous. It was Brent’s first time and he was a little anxious about that. He had had a girlfriend prior to her and admitted they had attempted to have sexual intercourse, but had only gotten as far as oral sex.
Renee didn’t care whom Brent had been with or what they had done. She was just excited about holding and kissing him. She had known from the very first kiss that she’d fall in love with him. And after they had made love the first time, she was convinced she’d met her soul mate for life. It was so perfect. No awkwardness at all. It was like their bodies just fit together perfectly.
Renee and Brent’s first sexual experience actually occurred at the Pooles’ home on Kerstmill Road. They lived in a ranch-style brick house across from the rock quarry and asphalt plant owned by Vulcan Materials, where Brent’s dad was employed. Renee and Brent jokingly referred to him as “Barney Rubble.” While Brent’s parents were upstairs, they were downstairs in the basement, watching a movie they had rented. But before long, they started kissing and petting, until finally things got out of control and the movie was long forgotten.
For Renee, everything had been storybook perfect. She and Brent were young and made love every chance they got. Their passion was so strong they never missed an opportunity to be together. Brent went to work after school, so he would have Renee meet him at his truck. He had tinted the windows in his truck so no one could see what they were doing. Before he went to work and she to her next class, they would disrobe in the cab and make love. When that got too cramped, Brent lined the bed of his truck with carpet and they’d climb back there and make love.
Sometime afterward, Bre
nt’s classmates started kidding him about the “rocking and knocking” truck in the parking lot. And when Renee started complaining about the carpet burns, he took some of his money he earned working at the bus station and rented a room at the Innkeeper Motel on Peter’s Creek Parkway.
Renee confided to her friends that she didn’t know why they always went to the same motel, but it sure beat doing it in the truck. Brent said he couldn’t help but feel like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. All the employees at the Innkeeper Motel had grown accustomed to him, his blue-and-white pickup truck and his mysterious lover. But he didn’t care. Some days he even went by early to pay for the room and pick up the key so he wouldn’t have to waste time on the trivial things.
The in crowd Renee used to hang out with quickly became the out crowd after she started dating Brent. She abruptly ditched her old friends, believing he was all she ever needed to make her life complete. After Brent graduated from high school, he chose to attend diesel school in Tennessee. Renee saw no need to continue school if Brent wasn’t going to be there and dropped out in the tenth grade. That year, she had a disagreement with the assistant principal and got expelled for using the “N” word. Her father found out what had happened and took her back to school to apologize, but the die had already been cast.
Renee had been working as a cashier in the cosmetics department at the Drug Emporium since she was fourteen. Living at home, and with no real expenses, she used most of her money to buy presents for Brent. While he was away at school, they maintained their relationship, calling one another regularly and writing letters. He came home every other weekend and would sometimes spend the night with Renee at her parents’ home.
One day, out of the blue, Brent confessed to Renee that an ex-girlfriend of his lived in Tennessee and he had looked her up. Said she had wanted a ride back to North Carolina to visit her friends, and since Brent was coming home that weekend, he agreed to give her a lift. In return, she had given him a blow job.
Renee was furious. How could he let something like that happen? She decided the only way not to let that happen was to make sure Brent wasn’t lonely and to find out what was going on at his school. She started visiting him in Tennessee, one time agreeing to stay with him for several months. While she was there, she found out about a girl he claimed he had taken to the hospital. Or, at least that was his story and he was sticking to it. He told Renee she had come to his door selling magazines and he innocently had given her a ride to the hospital, and that was why she had his leather jacket. Brent swore he loved Renee more than anything in the world and promised never to let anyone come between them again.
Like all relationships, Brent and Renee’s always had its ups and downs. Although Renee continually seemed to be at odds with Brent’s mother, she was beginning to feel somewhat comfortable around his family. She had forgiven his parents for calling her a “whore” and a “slut” the night they caught her and Brent naked, and she didn’t put up a fuss whenever he asked her to do something for their sake. There were times when he would take her out for a date, then drive her back home to change clothes before she went to his house. Brent would never admit his mother had said anything about the way she dressed, but Renee knew she would always have to be mindful of what she wore around her.
Renee fondly remembered a particular day when Brent and his parents came to visit her dad at his shop next to their house. She was sick with a cold and went to Brent’s truck to get her cough drops. When she reached in the door pocket of his truck, to her utter surprise, she found a little box with a diamond inside. She was so excited, she had to tell someone and later confided to Brandy that Brent had bought her a diamond. She swore her sister to secrecy, but Brandy let it slip out. Brent was angry at Brandy when she ruined his surprise, but not deterred. That night, he came back over to their house and phoned her from her dad’s shop. He asked her to come out of the house, that he wanted to talk with her about something.
Renee said she still didn’t feel well, but Brent wouldn’t take no for an answer. When she finally came walking out the door, he told her to close her eyes and he got down on one knee, with a single yellow rose in his hand, and proposed. “Kimberly Renee Poole, would you marry me?” he said romantically. She started crying, but somehow managed to squeeze out an acceptance. After he handed her the yellow rose, she saw the diamond, fastened onto one of the leaves, sparkling in the light.
Brent had always been careful to use a condom when he and Renee were having sex. He knew if he got her pregnant, abortion would not be an option. But now that they were engaged, why worry? They had already decided to get married and knew they were going to be together for a lifetime, so what difference did it make?
But in the spring of 1995, Renee began craving pickles and other odd assortments of foods. A home pregnancy test confirmed she was pregnant, and when she called Brent to tell him, he said he had already figured it out. He told her it didn’t matter; she was seventeen and he was twenty. He had already completed diesel school and was working for Mack Truck sales in Kernersville. She was working at Home Depot. If they needed any further help financially, he knew both their parents would help out.
Renee wanted to have this baby for Brent, but she found it difficult to concentrate at home. When she and her mother argued about her not following the rules of the house, she started spending nights over at her friend April’s house. That didn’t help to resolve the situation, and as a final ultimatum, Marie packed her daughter’s stuff and left it outside on the porch.
With the usual obstinacy of an ox, Renee picked up her things, drove back to April’s house and moved in with her. April was only sixteen and living with her older sister, who ironically was one of Brent’s ex-girlfriends. Her sister was working as an exotic dancer at a gentleman’s club in Winston-Salem and making good enough money to let them stay as long as they liked. After a few phone calls, Renee’s parents learned she was staying with April and that April had started dancing in the club as well. They were afraid Renee would follow suit.
Renee assured her parents that April’s choices didn’t really affect her either way. It was her life after all, and she had a right to live it as she pleased. She then revealed to them she was pregnant and that Brent was the father. With a baby on the way, there was no way she was going to be dancing naked.
Renee’s parents always liked Brent. They thought of him as the son they never had. All they wanted for their daughter was to be happy. She didn’t have to marry Brent, but if that was what she wanted, then they would accept her decision. They asked Renee to move back home.
Jack and Marie Summey found out they weren’t the first parents—nor would they be the last—to hold their tongues and their breath over decisions their children had made. Renee and Brent had been together for seven years, and in spite of all the odds against them, they seemed to love each other. Brent assured Renee’s parents that he loved Renee more than life itself, but he wasn’t so sure how his parents would respond to the news of her being pregnant.
Brent told his future in-laws that his dad would probably take it okay, but it was his mother he was concerned about. Said she’d worry the warts off a toad over the smallest things. And he knew she wasn’t going to like them having a baby out of wedlock. She’d be terrified of what the people in the church and the community were going to say. Lord how people love to talk.
Brent was right. His parents were upset when he first told them about the pregnancy, but eventually they got over it. One night, Bill brought out a jar of pickles and told Renee she would probably be wanting them soon and officially welcomed her into his family. Brent said his mother had finally accepted it, too, but was still worried about saving face with their friends. His mother insisted they get married before Renee started showing.
Renee’s parents had wanted her to wait until she had gotten her GED and had saved enough money to have a decent wedding. But out of respect for the Pooles, they started planning and throwing things together as quickly as possible. They
would have the wedding at their home and ask their friends to help prepare food and refreshments. Jack made a phone call to the minister who married him and Marie eighteen years ago and the reverend agreed to perform the ceremony.
On June 9, 1995, a perfect sunny day, Renee’s and Brent’s family and friends gathered at the Summey home in Clemmons to help them celebrate their wedding. Renee was beautiful in her long white gown. Her dark hair had been pulled up into a cascade of curls, laced with a matching white floral band, and she wore a corsage of her favorite flower, three yellow roses.
In front of the Summeys’ gray stone fireplace, Brent turned to his bride for the first time in her wedding dress and a smile lit up his face. The minister read from the Bible, then asked if Brent took Renee to be his lawful and wedded wife until death did they part. He smiled at her nervously before replying, “I do.” Renee had no problems with her vows, and after the minister asked for rings, she placed a small gold wedding band on his ring finger and pledged her love forever.
It was all over in about ten minutes. Renee and Brent were now husband and wife. Everyone raised a glass of apple cider—Brent’s family had asked that no alcoholic beverages be at the wedding—toasted the bride and groom and wished them well on their honeymoon in the mountains at Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
Six months later, Renee gave birth to Katie Lynn Poole at Forsyth Memorial Hospital, in Winston-Salem. Brent’s brother, Craig, and his wife, Amy, were also at the same hospital with their newborn. Bill and Agnes Poole were elated to have two little granddaughters at the hospital. It was probably the most special day of Agnes’s life; that is, until she walked in Renee’s room and saw a strange man standing by her bed. She noticed the suspicious red-faced man couldn’t get out of the room fast enough after she had walked in. But Renee claimed Danny was just a coworker from Home Depot, somebody who just happened to be at the hospital and had stopped by to congratulate her.