Chapter 35 – Shay
Chapter Thirty-Five
Shay
I’m in heaven here. I parallel park the truck without a traumatic incident and wander three blocks down to the street with the craft fair entrance.
I pay twenty dollars to enter and then I’m in a world of beads, gems, and color that dazzles me with every step.
I love it here. There’s incense coming from the stalls, the distant sound of drums and flutes from some of the other stalls and beautiful handmade jewelry everywhere.
Turquoise. Silver. Quartz. Bright red beads.
Everywhere I turn, there’s something beautiful.
But my purse is heavy here and I think Cody would be disappointed (if not outright annoyed) if I came home empty handed. I try on the ring and it fits the ring finger on my right hand. Gorgeous.
“Looks good with your skin tone,” the jeweler says earnestly, but she seems shy about hard-selling. I make it easy on her.
“I’ll take it.”
She beams when I agree to buy the ring and I feel this rush of happiness that I could make her day and that this woman’s ring is the first piece of nice jewelry I’ve ever bought for myself.
I put the ring on right away. It’s heavy, which only adds to how elegant the ring feels on my finger.
My eye wanders to a stall selling small watercolor paintings.
A pair of sisters sit at the stall, one wearing a pink wig and the other with her black hair in two braids.
They strike up a conversation about the paintings.
The one with the pink wig isn’t the painter, which surprises me, but she’s the chattier one and she explains that she’s here because she’s a better salesperson.
I find myself absorbed by her story until a distant voice sends a shiver down my spine.
I haven’t thought about the strange mixture of a Jamaican-Canadian accent for months at this point.
Cody and I have slowly built up a sense of safety here that I have come to rely on.
But there are some voices you can never forget, no matter how hard you try.
I swear I hear my ex-husband’s voice and I quickly lose focus on the paintings in front of me.
My head whips around, but just as soon as I hear the voice, it disappears and I don’t notice a large, light-skinned man skulking around the craft fair.
It must be all in my head. I buy two paintings from the sisters.
One is a large oil painting of a hummingbird with symbolism from her tribe in the background that she explained in detail before I started quietly freaking out.
I feel more nervous as I wander around the craft fair.
I’m high alert for sounds, but I don’t want to rush and text Cody like a baby after I just got the freedom I’ve been desperately craving.
I want to be more than a victim. Someone he found in an arranged marriage who's going to be meek and craving his protection the entire time. I feel like I’m not myself whenever I’m weak – like I’m somehow betraying all black women every time I don’t react like a lioness under duress.
The truth is, you go through enough that it’s hard to be consistently strong all the time.
When you lose your strength – you have to take time to build it back up.
I finally got to this point of independence where I can drive a truck downtown on my own.
I don’t want fears about my ex-husband to destroy this and I don’t want Cody to think that I’m always going to be that weak, confused single mother who spilled out of Oske’s truck to meet him for the first time.
To calm myself down, I convince myself that I just need to put the art I bought already into the truck and then enter the craft fair again.
The hairs on the back of my neck rise up as I get close to the truck.
I reach into my dress pocket – yes, I know – for my key fob and feel my cell phone flopping around in there.
I should call Cody. I unlock the truck and put my paintings in the back. I lean over to make sure they’re stacked properly, my phone burning a hole in my pocket.
“Hello, baby mama dearest.”
Oh hell no. I whip around and for the first time in over two years, I face Caleb’s father – Renshaw. He smiles mockingly at me, clearly enjoying the fear plastered on my face.
“Don’t try to run,” Renshaw says, opening his old denim jacket and exposing a cold metal pistol. “You get in the back seat and give me those car keys…”
He makes me turn out my pockets. Nobody wants to bother two black people in a place like this because they assume that we know each other. Renshaw makes it clear that if I scream, he’ll turn the gun on somebody random and pull the trigger. He’s crazy.
Renshaw takes my phone and puts it in his pocket.
He forces me into the front seat of the truck before searching the vehicle for weapons and climbing into the back with a gun pressed to my stomach.
He doesn’t know I’m pregnant. I might have a baby bump, but I’m plump and wearing clothing that doesn’t make it obvious.
“I need you to follow that GPS and take the first on-ramp South. You understand?”
I start the truck. He must have watched me get here if he knows that I can drive because a hallmark of my relationship with Renshaw was him keeping me away from ever getting that skill. He had excuses that seemed reasonable, of course, but Cody doesn’t want to keep me in a cage.
I can feel the difference now – the safety you get from being with a protective man compared to the toxic control from a man who would throw you under the bus for his own ego.
Slowly, I pull out of the parking spot and my phone automatically connects to the truck via Bluetooth. Renshaw’s attention snaps to the big screen in the middle of the truck console where the map pops up along with music and my last text message from Cody Hollingsworth.
“Who is Cody?”
The phone has my location on. If I start heading South, Cody will know and he’ll freak out. I don’t have to fight this – I just have to trust my husband and trust myself to stay alive until he gets here.
“My husband.”
“You have a man living with my son?”
“I’m married, Renshaw. We’re not married. I moved on with my life.”
He shoves the pistol into my ribs harder to hurt me. I flinch because it hurts and because I’m scared he’ll hurt the baby. I don’t even care about myself the same way that I care about my unborn child right now.
I’ve made my way out of a few scrapes, but I don’t want to lose this baby, this connection to my new life and this new direction.
“You moved on? You let some other man raise my son while I’m out here on the streets?”
I take the ramp onto the highway. He hasn’t thrown my phone out the window, which means Cody will be alerted to my strange behavior soon. I drive the speed limit as I merge. My hands have never been more sweaty. Renshaw smells like sweat in the back seat and I want to throw up.
But I keep driving. It doesn’t take ten minutes for Cody to call me. Fuck. He probably thinks I just decided to go to get some food or something, but the call rings throughout the truck.
“That your man?” Renshaw asks.
I don’t answer him.
“I don’t like that,” he says.
For a moment, he takes the gun off my hips.
I wish I could say I swerved off the road or did something crazy, but I had no idea what Renshaw was going to do.
He takes my phone off his lap and tosses it out of the truck window while I’m driving away from it heading south at eighty-five miles per hour.
Cody won’t have any idea where I am.