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Overall Summary
Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s memoir, Three Little Words, tells the story of how she was born to a teenage mother and spent her early childhood in foster care. Her mother wasn’t able to take care of Ashley or her brother Luke. After their parents’ arrest, they were placed in foster care together.
Ashley believes she will soon be living with her mother again, but no one gives her any information or answers to any of her questions. She and Luke go live with Mr. and Mrs. Hines, but Ashley is quickly moved on because of behavioral issues that are supposedly out of control. Ashley stays briefly with the Ortiz family who recognize that she has a lot of intelligence and allow her to start kindergarten early because they see how smart she is. Dusty visits Lorraine in prison where he reveals that Lorraine was put there for drugs charges after getting pregnant by a man named Juan Carlos Rivera before leaving town without him when things got bad between them.
Ashley and Luke move in with their maternal grandfather, who is sometimes drunk and abusive to his partner. Adele is loving to the children, but she’s poor and has no job skills. The family lives happily for a while before their grandfather gets arrested for drunk driving. He eventually shoots someone during an argument about a car sale, which results in him being sent to prison.
Ashley and Luke are placed in a foster home, but they are soon taken away from Adele. They move to the Potts family, who have been accused of child sexual abuse. Ashley is then moved on to another foster home with Luke.
Ashley and Luke move into an overcrowded trailer with Mr. and Mrs. Moss, who have several other foster children. They’re abused regularly by being forced to drink hot sauce, run laps in the sun, go without food or be put in pressure positions while standing for hours on end. Although people do occasionally investigate reports of abuse at the Moss’s house, they fail to follow up because they believe that Ashley is lying about her situation and that she’s actually a model foster child who has made it all up just to cause trouble for them.
Ashley moves into a children’s shelter after she has been taken away from the Mosses. She informs anyone who will listen about her situation and people finally pay attention to her. Ashley goes to Luke’s foster home with him, but she is still worried that they are going to be separated again. A Guardian ad Litem named Mary Miller meets with them and asks what can be done for them. Later, Ashley will realize how much Mary truly did for their futures because of the difficult decision she made in order to get Lorraine’s parental rights terminated so that Ashley could become an orphaned child instead of remaining in the care of Lorraine as a ward of the state until adulthood when it would have been nearly impossible for her to leave Lorraine or find someone else willing to take on guardianship over an adult woman who had just given birth out-of-wedlock.
Ashley and Luke move into a foster home. The staff are kind and supportive, but the children have to wait more than a year before they’re adopted. However, Ashley meets Phil Courter at an adoption picnic, who eventually adopts her. Meanwhile, another family wants to adopt Luke too. Eventually, she moves in with them full-time after getting to know their adult children Josh and Blake.
Ashley is still wary of opening up to being loved or loving others. Although Gay and Phil express their love for her, Ashley feels a need to stay true to her mother and love no one else. She slowly lets down her defenses, though. They attend court together and make the adoption legal and official, although this makes Ashley feel even more distant from Lorraine. Gay contacts Lorraine, but this leads to highs of excitement followed by crashes of disappointment when it doesn’t work out well. Eventually they exchange letters again, although these often lead to high points followed by low ones as well because they’re so different in personality that it’s hard for them to understand each other completely at first glance. Finally Ashley meets with Lorraine again along with her new half-sister who she has never met before; however the reunion is strained and uncomfortable because there are still many issues between them that need resolving on both sides before they can get along better than ever.
