When I first saw Shelby, I thought she was going to be asking for money. She had the look of a desperate person. I was right and I was wrong. She was desperate, but it wasn’t money she needed.
I was sitting alone with my laptop at a fast food restaurant in downtown Trussville Friday afternoon. There was almost nobody else in the place, so I didn’t notice when she came in. I was sitting in a quiet corner, but she approached me and asked if I could help her.
She had cuts and bruises on her face. (Or some kind of wounds.) She wore sloppy and dirty clothes. She wasn’t wearing makeup. She looked desperate.
Instead of asking for money, she told me that she had been in an auto accident on I-59 earlier. A friend of hers who works about two blocks from where we were had gone to the site of the wreck, but he had to return to work, so he dropped her off at Hardee’s. She had a phone that belonged to someone else and its battery was about dead. She said she had been calling to find friends who would come pick her up, but nobody would agree to come.
She said her mother lives about 10 miles away in a part of town called Center Point. It’s a declining part of the area and I almost never go there. She said her mother had her two children there, but her mother had no car to pick her up. She wanted me to get her at least close to the area. She said she thought she could talk friends into picking her up if they just had to drive a few blocks instead of 10 miles.
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