the National Guard, but after two years, “They stopped paying me. So, I asked them about it. Nothing happened. So, I asked them about it again. Nothing happened. So, I just didn’t go to drill. A lieutenant called me up one day and said, ‘You have to come to drill. We own you. If you don’t come, we’ll send MPs after you.’ I told him, ‘It’s a job. I get paid. I’ll come when I get paid.’ I never heard from them again. I got my discharge papers, and that was it. It was around the time they were scaling back, and they were pushing people out left and right.”
While living in Denver, he went to college and earned his associate’s degree in automotive engineering. “I came back to Sioux Falls for a girl,” he confesses. He enrolled in a college there and pursued his bachelor’s degree. “It must have been three or four months into the year when we all showed up at school one day, but the doors were padlocked shut. We found out that the owner of the school had gambled away everyone’s tuition in Vegas. The feds were there, confiscating everything, and she was going away in cuffs.”
The students were told that the government would forgive their student loans, or they could transfer their credits to a new school. “I just said, ‘I’m done. I’m out.’” He was barely twenty years old and wasn’t sure what to do with his life. Twice burned by administrations mishandling funds, he decided to stick with what he knew best, fixing cars. “That’s why I’m still doing this for a living. I never did figure out what I wanted to do.”
A couple of years after the school closed its doors, Dave was working at a truck stop’s gas station in Council Bluffs, Iowa, when a cute young woman caught his eye. Amy Flora, petite and sweet natured, also worked at the truck stop. She said yes when Dave asked her out. They ended up staying together for over a decade, and they had two children, Calista, born in 2001, and Trey, in 2003. The little family moved to Wisconsin when Dave was promoted. They started out in Madison, later relocating to Oshkosh.
Almost all relationships have conflicts, and Dave and Amy’s was no exception. Perhaps their biggest issue was their stance on marriage. “I wanted to get married, and he didn’t want to,” Amy explains. She needed the security of a forever commitment, but Dave saw marriage as a trap. For all practical purposes, they were married. They were monogamous and lived together, raising their two kids, but Amy wondered why the father of her children was reluctant to make it legal. The conflict over the marriage question created an undercurrent of resentment, and their smaller disagreements escalated because of that.
In addition, finances were tight, and it was a stressful time. “We didn’t get to do fun things together,” Amy emphasizes. “We were working hard to make ends meet, and we worked opposite shifts.” They arranged their schedules so that one of them would always be with the children, but it left little time for the couple to spend time with each other.
Wisconsin had never felt like home to Amy. Born and raised in Council Bluffs, she missed her family and friends there. “I lived in Wisconsin for twelve years, and I didn’t have too many friends there. I was just lonely. I said, ‘If we aren’t going to go forward, and we’re just going to sit still, I want to go home.’” In the fall of 2011, the family moved into an apartment in Council Bluffs. Amy was glad to be near her friends again, but she and Dave weren’t getting along. They made an effort to be civil to each other for the sake of the children, but tensions were high. As painful as it was, they decided they could not stay together.
CHAPTER THREE
THE SUMMER OF 2012 did not start out well for Dave. “I moved into my apartment with a pile of clothes and a computer.” He had left the furniture for Amy and his kids. “I had nothing else. Not even a bowl.” The new apartment was in Omaha, about twenty minutes from Amy’s place across the Missouri River.
When locals claim Omaha “invented hospitality,” and encourage tourists to “talk to strangers,” they might be joking but visitors agree it’s a downright friendly place. Neighbor helps neighbor, and when folks pass on the street, they smile and nod.