Page 1 of Worth of Waste

Karen

WHO are you?

Karen Martin woke up each and every day, asking herself that same question.

Who are you? How did you get here? Why did you do this to yourself?

She didn’t have the right answers to tell her reflection in the mirror, certainly none that would explain her current situation, or the hell she had found herself living in. She also knew she had no one else to blame—mostly—other than her reflection staring back at her.

Maybe that was the worst part, the fact that she didn’t have someone else to blame.

How could she, when she was alone?

Today was a harder day than normal, and those questions she always asked came with a little more force than normal, if only because the first thing she saw on the small television as she sat down with a cup of decaffeinated tea in her hands was his face.

The first thought that came to her mind?

That’s a better picture than the mugshot.

A shot of Dino DeLuca sitting in the courtroom, suit and tie perfectly in place, standing as he handed his ‘guilty’ plea over. And then he was gone, the image fading away as the anchor room flashed back on the television where the anchors had already moved onto another story.

Karen had only caught the very tail end of the news story, but what she had seen was more than enough to know Dino wouldn’t be coming back out anytime soon.

A sickness climbed from her sensitive stomach, and she set the tea aside, not daring to take another drink. She could have blamed it on the pregnancy—blamed her warring emotions on the little life just barely beginning—but it would have been an excuse.

She didn’t know what to do.

She was alone.

She was pregnant.

She was scared.

An item caught her attention out of the corner of her eye, and for a second, those fears bled away and were then replaced by a heated anger swelling in her chest. The thick manila envelope, filled with stacks of cash and topped with a note Karen couldn’t begin to understand, sat on the very edge of her coffee table.

She’d recognized Dino’s handwriting on the package the second the mail man banged on her door and shoved it into her hands, pissed off because it was too big to put in her mailbox downstairs. She hadn’t known what was happening to him at the time she’d gotten the package—that early Monday morning had just been another day for her, although a sadder, bleaker morning, given she had been convinced Dino’s lack of presence was yet another sign that she would just have to move forward alone.

How stupid she had been …

How crazy …

Karen glared at the cash again, hating that she hadn’t just taken it somewhere and handed it off to get it out of her hands. A charity, maybe.

The police, even.

She sighed.

No doubt, the police would be happy to get a package like that from Karen, especially if she could say it was from Dino. Something stopped her from doing either—the charity or the police.

Her pregnancy.

Dino’s child.

The unborn life was the one and only thing that stopped Karen’s anger from making her do something she might regret one day. She knew Dino hadn’t meant any harm by sending her the money, and his note inside the package had only confirmed that fact, but the last few sentences of the scribbled mess had just left her more confused.

Don’t give the child my names, it had read.

Karen tried not to dwell on that as much as she could, but it was becoming more and more impossible as the days went on. Especially on a day like today, when she happened to see something like the news broadcast on the television, yet she still felt so far removed from the entire scene.