(Tip of the cap to Rogers Waters for the title)
*
It was a dark and stormy night. (Well, actually it was)
Certainly darker, and far more stormy that Regina Wellstone was comfortable driving in. If it had just been rain, the 38 year old CPA would have been able to make it north to her home in Sioux City with both eyes closed. When the soft pitter-pat of sleet began to hit her windshield just as she pulled out onto Highway 29 out of Omaha a little after 10pm however, Regina started to feel queasy. That feeling was only heightened when the tires of her Prius began to shimmy on the increasingly treacherous pavement below.
She knew she should have taken the offer of her client that evening to stay at a hotel back in Omaha since some mixed precipitation was in the forecast, but Regina decided to soldier on. The analytic part of her brain quickly noted the absence of traffic flowing south down 29, so she knew the storm was most likely worse the further north she went. Unfortunately, there were things going on at home that were pulling her up that slick and desolate stretch of rural Iowa highway.
In a sign of the times, Regina had family issues her rearing hadn't prepared her for. Having grown up in a relatively traditional household, with a Father who worked 50 hours+ a week, and a Mother who stayed home to raise the four kids, Regina could have easily latched onto a guy right out of high school, married and started a family of her own. For whatever reason, she wanted to blaze a trail of her own in the world and wound up going to college and getting her accounting degree before meeting the man she would eventually marry in her late 20's.
While it wasn't exactly a fairy tale, Regina's relationship with her Husband, Kenneth, was pretty stable and the couple had two kids, an 8 year old Son who was planned and a 5 year old Daughter that had been a little bit of a shock.
Between Ken's executive job at a finance company and the part time work Regina did balancing the books of a large farm co-op in the area, paying the bills had never been a big problem for the Wellstones. Like many people swimming peacefully along however, the recession in '08 caused things to get far more choppy.
Ken was laid off and really didn't pursue a new job considering the unemployment check was more than he could get working at a new place. Things were OK for about a year, Ken had even taken an active role in being 'Mr. Mom' while Regina took on more hours at her job and even began to do some word of mouth freelancing work during tax season. When Ken didn't show any 'giddy-up' when his benefits ran out however, things around the house slowly began to deteriorate.
For starters, Ken started to drink. It was no secret when the two were dating years ago that Ken's Father was an alcoholic, but Ken had always gone out of his way to say he'd never tread down the same path. Between the hit to his self esteem from losing his job and all the free time on his hands, Ken found himself self medicating in ways he'd swore he never would. It had started out as a couple of innocent beers in the afternoon but eventually Kenneth gravitated towards something more potent until Regina would find him drunk most afternoons when she made it home from work.
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.
"Its so dark out here, some tractor trailer might not have time to move over without hitting him," that nagging voice chimed in.
"Well..anybody crazy enough to be out walking in all this deserves what they get," she gasped defiantly under her breath, trying to wash the image of the hitchhiker out of her already overburdened mind.
"Yeah..you're gonna feel really great when you pick up the paper in a day or two and see some poor, unfortunate guy either froze to death or got flattened down here on Route 29," her conscience continued to grind.
"You'll feel even worse when its you in the paper being found strangled to death by an insane drifter," her common sense rightfully countered.
By now, Regina's knuckles were white as she gripped the wheel, and not just from the stress of driving through such deplorable conditions. Quite a bit more internal dialogue volleyed back and forth inside Regina's head as she sat erect and motionless in the driver's seat.
Another mile marker tripped into the Prius' rear view when suddenly the late model Toyota drifted into the slow down lane for the next exit up ahead.
"What do you think you're doing?" her inner rationale begged, but no sane answer was forthcoming.
"Well..if you're gonna do this..at least call somebody so they know where you are...just don't tell them what you're about to do," Regina Wellstone made that final deal with herself as she took the exit then doubled back the way she came.
