As she pawed through an endless rack of second hand, collared shirts Shay noticed they were oddly organized. All arranged by color, but not size. The rainbow chaos seemed ominous and she stopped scraping hangers across the rusty bar to take a deep breath. And then another. She rose above the musty thrift store smells to focus in on the court-day countdown she’d created in her head. She had three to five years of impending peace to look forward to. In seventy two more hours her baby daddy would undoubtedly be back in the pen and out of the house. Technically, it was a mobile home. But it was hers. And a two-bedroom trailer out in the Kentucky backwoods was a long, green, stretch aways from the cracked concrete she had grown up on in Detroit. Shay found herself in the hills by accident, but she took root fast. She couldn’t help but smile, thinking of the clean carpets and the washer and dryer and the well-stocked kitchen cabinets and no man to get in her way. Soon. Seventy two more hours. The dreamy curve of her mouth dropped as she felt his eyes creep up her backside and she turned her head and took a long look at him. He was all sprawled out across a beat down lazy boy over in the furniture section. The grimey material made her shiver, but he looked completely comfortable. He was grimey himself. His hair was greasy and his jeans were too tight and his bulging beer belly peeked out from under a stained t-shirt. The father of her child was glaring and pouting in the Goodwill furniture section like somebody’s bratty kid. Shay snatched a shirt that was a size too big for him with awkward, unflattering, stripes and paired it with puke colored cargo pants and started across the room with her patented huffy stride, smacking his cracked cowboy boot down off the arm of the chair as she passed him by...
