The family’s finances increasingly strapped, Regina sadly found it necessary to hire a babysitter for her two kids just so they wouldn’t have to come home everyday from school to see their Father wallowing around in his self-pity. Thankfully Ken Wellstone wasn’t a violent or angry drunk, but his obnoxious and dim-witted behavior wasn’t something Regina wanted her children exposed to if she could help it.
One the evenings such as her current work trip to Omaha, Regina would make arrangements to leave the kids with her Sister just so she wouldn’t have to rouse them at such a late hour just to drive them home.
Among the problems she faced being away from her kids far more than she wanted, it allowed Ken to play the ‘good guy’ in all this. Even though the kids were with the babysitter a good bit of the time, he never missed an opportunity, sometimes subtle and sometimes not, to dig at Regina in front of the children for being gone so often.
Wired thankfully to take the high road whenever possible, Regina resisted the urge to remind the kids the reason she was gone so much was because their Father was too lazy to go out and get a job. Still, it was undeniably a hot button issue for Regina, and holding all those emotions in inevitably created a bubbling and toxic witch’s brew inside her.
Her part-time job at the co-op certainly wasn’t enough to keep the family afloat, so Regina found herself having to branch her accounting skills out until she’d corralled several jobs outside Sioux City. Considering the distance between towns along the western Iowa and eastern Nebraska border, Regina often found herself saddled with a two to three hour drive each way when she was tending to the accounts she couldn’t manage over the computer. Thankfully she’d acquired a handful of clients in Omaha so she could commit one full day every so often to drive down and knock them all out at the same time.
The long and lonely, windswept stretches of farmland highway also provided Regina with ample time to process stuff in her head, not that that was always a good thing considering the way her seemingly ideal life had spiraled out of control. There would be no thinking about anything other than the pavement in front of her on this night however, as it quickly disappeared beneath a wintery mix in front of her.
Needless to say, as narrowed as her focus was, Regina barely saw the dark figure trudging up the right shoulder of the highway when she approached at about 45mph. Pulling her car to the left just in time to keep from drenching him in a wave of slush, Regina babied the steering wheel to keep from spinning out as she drifted back into her lane.
“Holy Cow…why would anyone be out walking anywhere on a night like this..much less the interstate,” she mumbled to herself, the beating of her heart audible over the raspy hum of the defroster in the dash.
Stealing a quick glimpse or two in the rear view to see the figure behind her gradually disappear into the fog, the gnawing pest of Regina’s conscience began nipping at her ears.