Pepper and I met (virtually) when we were both freelance-writing for the same client. Well, Steve wasn’t actually the “end-user” client himself; he was more like a broker of freelance writing-jobs. His jobs paid a little less-per-word than the gigs I landed on my own (because he was taking a cut), but he was a steady source of work. And I figured if you calculated pay-per-hour, counting the time I’d have to spend looking for jobs, I probably came out ahead. In any case it was a sanity-saver, having a steady stream of assignments coming in, instead of having to prowl for them myself.

It struck me as an odd business to get into, for a person who couldn’t write, himself. Penning a comprehensible email was clearly the outside edge of his capability in that field, so I frequently wondered how Steve found himself running a “stable” of writers. Pepper & I were his go-to gals, and he introduced us to one another when we were working on opposite ends of the same project. I think it was the casino articles—we had to turn out five hundred articles about different slot machine games, using the keywords provided to us, and (here’s the deadly tricky part) not repeating ourselves. We were running on a tight timeline, fueled by pots of coffee in each of our respective time zones, and racing the clock.

As we hacked our way through the project (and yes, “hack” is the right word here!), we kept a chat window open with each other, and we kept each other in stitches and giggles. We were downright silly in our light-headed state of sleeplessness, and we found we shared a sense of humor. Pepper said we belonged in a padded cell (meaning, of course, a loony bin), I replied that I was pretty sure we were IN one—a virtual padded cell—and she concluded that we were roommates. From that point, for all the years we knew each other, we addressed each other as “Roomie!“

When Steve bowed out of the business due to ill health, Pepper hooked me up with Sunil, who became our new Steve, and we both kept writing. Kept our chat window open, kept giggling.

We dropped out of contact when I stepped away from freelancing, but picked up again a couple years later, as if no time had passed. We passed partial works of fiction back and forth for critiques. We dreamed up a “content marketing” business, built the website (loads more giggles, and considerably more fun than our earlier collaborations), and even served a few clients before my life’s dramas caught me up and took up all my bandwidth again. Still, we could periodically give a “Hey, Roomie!” shout-out and catch up with one another. I reached out to her at the height of COVID and was relieved to hear back. She was, after all, old enough to have been on a date with Frank Sinatra (just one of many stories from a life lived to the fullest!), so she was in a high-risk demographic.

This week, though, the padded cell is only echoing my shout-out. She hasn’t replied to my email, and she’s gone from FaceBook. She hasn’t posted to her blog since March a few years ago, and our last email exchange was a couple months before that. I don’t have contact information for her daughter, or anyone else whom I could ask… but I’m feeling those empty echoes.

And the world seems a little less spicy if Pepper might not be in it.