Second Chances

by William Umansky

  SECOND CHANCES

  SECOND CHANCES

  Stories of Hope, Redemption and Forgiveness

  WILLIAM UMANSKY

  Second Chances: Stories of Hope, Redemption and Forgiveness

  by William D. Umansky

  The Lawman Press

  1945 E. Michigan Street

  Orlando, FL 32806

  (407) 228-3838

  www.thelawman.net

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  Copyright © 2011 by William D. Umansky

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 13: 978-1-935245-49-0

  ISBN 10: 1-935245-49-0

  Cover Design: Dragonfly Art & Design

  First Edition

  11 12 13 14 — 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter One Personal Injury

  Chapter Two Forgiving Daniel

  Chapter Three Singing a New Song

  Chapter Four A Firefighter’s Best Friend

  Chapter Five The Priest and the Drug Dealer

  Chapter Six The Journals of Jeannie

  Chapter Seven A Picture Paints a History

  Chapter Eight Dear Mom

  Chapter Nine Paradise Lost and Found

  Chapter Ten A New Beginning: A Story of Unconditional Love

  Chapter Eleven Thanks, Coach

  Chapter Twelve Pillar of the Community

  Chapter Thirteen Rebirth

  Chapter Fourteen Cyberbullies: How They Wrecked and Saved a Life

  Chapter Fifteen It’s Never Too Late

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  Dear Reader,

  Do you ever feel handcuffed by your personal failures? Like the things that happened in your past imprison you forever?

  We are all entitled to a second chance—an opportunity to get it right before we die, to forgive those who have hurt us in the past, redeeming ourselves presently for what we have done, and hoping for a better tomorrow. That’s why I’ve published this book.

  While the stories and characters here are purely fictional, you may come across one or two that strike a chord of familiarity, reminding you of someone in your life. I crafted each of the stories to center around three very important attributes that are necessary for a person’s self-evolution: hope, redemption, and forgiveness. It is my sincere hope that you will enjoy reading these short stories and that they will provide you with a spark, a reminder, or an awakening, if you will, to see the second chances in your own life.

  Bill Umansky

  Orlando, Florida

  March 2011

  CHAPTER ONE

  PERSONAL INJURY

  There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they’re necessary to reach places we have chosen to go.

  —Richard Bach

  As hurricane andrew ripped through the outer edge of South Florida, I sat in the women’s jail, watching the rain and feeling the wind blow. Back then, the guards would open the big screens on the other side of the bars, allowing the weather to come into the jail’s breezeway.

  The women’s jail was located in the middle of the city, and even though the rain came down in torrents, people still mingled on the streets by the restaurants and clubs. I could see lights twinkling and people laughing, dancing, holding each other, and having a great time.

  I used to be one of those people. Not anymore.

  I spent a great deal of time negotiating with God in those days. I promised God that if he got me out of that living hell, I would be good. I would be good to my mother and to my family. If God got me out of that stinking place, I would be a decent person. I would stop my bad ways. But God didn’t seem to be listening.

  Something had gone terribly wrong in my life to land me in jail. I was a former suburban housewife who lived in a beautiful 3,500-square-foot house: four bedrooms with a library, a baby grand piano, and a pool. I had been married fifteen years to the vice president of a national construction company. I worked as an English teacher at a nearby school and used my income to shop. We had a maid. We were members of a country club. We went out to dinner every Saturday night to expensive restaurants. We vacationed once a year to different parts of the country and to islands in the Caribbean.

  Now there I was, sitting on the concrete floor of a jail. I had been in that God-forsaken place one week, and no one I called would get me out. Even if I could get out, I had no place to go. No one wanted me.

  The truth is, I had become an arrogant, self-righteous, ungrateful bitch. Nothing was ever good enough for me. I was never satisfied. At the same time, I was deeply unhappy with myself. I used to think about that Peggy Lee song, “Is That All There Is?” and think of my life. I had grown up in a lot of dysfunction and had married someone who was stable and steady and dependable—but as the years passed, he became so dependable and so steady that for me he was boring.

  I also felt terribly alone. We tried marriage counseling; we read books on relationships; we did everything we knew to make it right, but we had reached an impasse that for whatever reason we could not get through. It wasn’t working. It had not been working for several years. But we were a good team, and we were both proud to be the couple that everyone wanted to be around, so we lived a life of “quiet desperation.” We started to live separate lives, take separate vacations, and have acquaintances that the other knew nothing about.

  My husband began taking a lot of business trips, and when he was out of town, I started going out with my girlfriends, who were also unhappy. We would commiserate over the newest wine or mixed drink, and we would talk and dream of that passion we thought we once had and now lost and thought we still needed in our lives.

  One thing I’ve learned through this is that a lethal attraction can exist between two people. It happens when there is a vulnerable person—which was me—who becomes the prey of another. The attraction is very strong, almost addictive, and when there is a strong physical, sexual attraction, it can be extremely powerful. The chemistry happens almost instantly—it comes out of nowhere, unexpectedly. It is beyond infatuation. You can’t get enough of the other person, and the risk of being together is not important—the feeling is so incredible and so intense that you will do anything to keep feeling it. It is very much like a drug. And because it is so lethal, it has the potential to be very, very dangerous.

  That is what happened when I met Dave.

  Within a few months of having met him, I was living in my own place, and every chance we got, we were together. He was so unlike my husband (who was soon to be my ex-husband). To me, Dave was extremely handsome, extremely exciting, and extremely different. He wasn’t like any of my friends’ husbands. He didn’t drive a Mercedes or a BMW—he had a Mustang and a Harley. He didn’t go jogging—he was a bodybuilder. He didn’t wear polo shirts—he had two tattoos. He didn’t have short hair—he had hair down his back. I thought he was wonderful.

  I wanted to share my joy with my friends and family, but when I brought him to meet them, they didn’t like him and didn’t approve of us. They told me he scared them and that I should be careful. They told me not to trust him. My closest friend at the time said he had the eyes of a shark.

  Did I listen? Did I hear? The more they criticized, the more I defended. He told me he was in sales, but I never asked what he sold, and frankly I didn’t care. I ha
d money, so it didn’t matter. He would tell me that I was beautiful, that I was smart, and that he had never been with a real lady before. No one had ever said those things to me. So I figured my friends and family just didn’t know him like I did. They didn’t see what I saw. They didn’t understand.

  And then one day he was gone. I couldn’t reach him by phone, so I drove to his place—he wasn’t there. For several days I called and called, but he wouldn’t call me back. I was frantic.

  After three or four days, he called me. He said he was in trouble and needed my help. He said he had run into two men from his past whom he owed money and that they had threatened to hurt him. What should he do?

  I remember asking him, “How much money do they want, Dave?”

  “Eight hundred dollars,” he said.

  “Is that all it is going to take to make this go away?”

  “Yes.”

  So I jumped in my car, went to the bank, and got the money. I met him where he said to meet him and gave him the cash. When I handed him the cash, I asked, “Is this enough to let you come back to me?”

  He said, “Baby, I’ve got to go.”

  And just like that, he was gone—the love of my life was gone.

  The next year was an insidious cat-and-mouse game that continued to take my life into more and more mayhem and confusion. Each day spiraled downward, becoming more desperate and dark. I learned that my beloved Dave was a con artist, a career criminal, a drug dealer, and a drug user. I had been an English teacher. I had never been in trouble. I had never even smoked a cigarette, and I had never been in the company of criminals. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but I followed him there in that next year, and I knew only one thing: that I loved this man and that he was in trouble. He needed me.

  In my efforts to help this man, to save him, to rescue him, I walked into crack houses, stayed in my car while drug deals were going down, helped him through rehab and then relapse, had my car stolen, stayed in horrible places, and got high. And in doing all that, I lost everything I ever had, everyone I ever loved, and almost destroyed myself.

  So there I was in jail.

  At one point, I got down on my knees and said, “Please God, help me. Help me, and I promise I will change.”

  Redemption came very slowly.

  I had tutored the daughters of a very prominent criminal attorney in town, and somehow his wife—one of my unhappy friends who had gone drinking with me in my past life—found out. Her husband became my attorney pro bono. Mr. Lymes was less than thrilled to take my case, but he did it with the utmost professionalism, dignity, and class.

  When I finally got out of jail, I went back to where I had lived, and everything I had left there was gone: my clothes, my furniture, my dishes, my computer, everything. My family would not have anything to do with me for months, so I lived in a garage. From there, I got a job as a secretary for a man who owned a trucking business and let me live in the back room of his warehouse.

  After six months of living in the warehouse, I went to court and learned that the judge was worried about my health—he said I looked “gray.” My mother was in the courtroom that day, and he asked her if she would let me come home and live with her. Reluctantly, she said yes.

  My attorney gave me sound advice at the time. He said that Dave was a career criminal and that I should let him bear the brunt of the crime by never being allowed to leave prison—the place where he belonged—while I took on the role of the victim. I didn’t follow the attorney’s suggestion. I kept my promise to God and resolved to take responsibility for the crimes Dave and I committed together.

  This decision cost me dearly. Because I had been arrested several times for felonies, I was unable to get a professional job. I had agreed to pay thousands of dollars in restitution for the crimes I committed and was put on probation for five years, so I had to do right.

  The man I worked for in the trucking business let me buy a car from him for $750. It had no paint, but it had ice-cold air. My mother would not allow me to park it near her home, so when I got home from work, sometimes very late at night, I would have to park it blocks away and then walk home. I was not invited to any family functions for years—no Christmas dinners, no Thanksgiving turkeys, no birthday celebrations. I was the family outcast and spent most of those years alone.

  I did construction cleaning, laid tile, cleaned fish, worked in a trailer park, and did a lot of waitressing. I worked on the holidays, when everyone else had somewhere else to go. With jobs like these, no one asks you your background. No one cares that you have a college degree or that you once lived in a 3,500-square-foot house with a pool and a maid. Those jobs are all about showing up on time and doing what you are expected to do.

  About three years later, I made a decision to leave the area. I still wanted to teach, and I thought my experiences would help me teach high-risk kids who never had much of a chance.

  When I applied for a teaching job, I got an interview immediately, but I had to go through a background check. Once the background check came back, I was required to sit through another interview with a panel of county school board members. After this second session, I waited outside in a hallway alone while they pondered their decision. Once the decision was made, I was invited back into the interview room. There, I was told by a school board member that “as God is my witness, and as long as I am alive, I will make sure that you and your kind of scum never teach another day in the state of Florida.” I remember getting out of my chair, thanking the school board members, walking to my car, and exploding in tears.

  I would never teach school again.

  From then on, I built up a shield to protect myself from that kind of attack and pain. I kept doing what I was supposed to do, but that experience stayed in my heart forever. I continued to scrub floors and wait tables, and then one day, a couple of years later, I got a new chance. God showed up.

  I was waiting on a doctor and his wife, and he was complaining that his front desk girl could not file anything correctly. I said, “Well, I know how to alphabetize.” He and his wife hired me.

  From there, I began to work my way up. I went to night school and took classes in different fields of study. I had forgotten that I loved to learn, and I was able to do well.

  I always had a terrible fear, though, of being found out. At my jobs, I did the best I could, but I was forever looking over my shoulder, fearing that one day the truth about me would be discovered and that I would be fired and humiliated. I was deeply ashamed of my past. So I had a simple strategy: show up on time, work really hard, do what I was asked to do, don’t complain, and hope that my boss would find me a valuable enough employee that he would overlook my past, if he ever found out about it, and let me stay.

  This plan worked for the most part, but I was always afraid. I had become good enough and smart enough to talk my way out of any awkward situation, but I never lost that fear of being found out. A pattern began to crop up in this new work life: whenever I felt the truth about my past being discovered in some way, such as being asked to be a notary or if I could be bonded, I would look for another job, find one, give my twoweek’s notice, and move on to somewhere else until the cycle began again.

  Years passed living in this silent fear.

  Then one day, I had the chance to interview for a job that I wasn’t really qualified to do, but that I could work myself into. It was a job with a very well-known attorney in town named Cab Martin. How did I even get the interview? My present boss was leaving the firm where I worked and thought I might be happy working with this new guy. So I went to the interview, and it lasted three and a half hours. It was the most intense interview I had ever had. We didn’t talk so much about my skill level but more about my philosophy of life. We had a meeting of the minds, so to speak.

  I set myself up to get through the interview as best I could—I figured it was a test of endurance more than anything, and I thought it went really well. I realized during those three hours, too, that t
his was exactly what I wanted. I had finally come to a place where I could communicate my ideas about life and about work to someone who seemed to really care what I was saying. I really wanted to work for this guy. He was different, innovative, smart, and an entrepreneur. At times, he was even a bit irreverent about his own profession—which was intriguing to me.

  The interview kept going really well, and I thought I had nailed it. When we were finally done, he seemed pleased. I shook his hand warmly and walked toward the door, and then he asked me: “Oh, by the way, if I were to do a background check on you, would I find anything?”

  I froze. Suddenly my heart stopped and I could not breathe. He had known all along what a fraud I was. I remember looking at him, feeling the blood rush to my face, and then taking a deep breath and saying, “Yes, you would find something out about me. Thank you again for your time.”

  I was able to get into my car and drive a few blocks away. Then I stopped the car and cried my heart out. I just sat there and sobbed. All the hurt and all the memories came flooding back. I thought I had done so well in the interview. I thought I had made that man believe I was good, but he knew I wasn’t after all. It would never really change. It would always be the same. No one would ever give me a second chance for all the sins I had committed and all the wrong I had done, no matter how hard I tried.

  The following day, Mr. Martin offered me a job at his law firm. He gave me a second chance. We never talked about that background check, and I don’t know if he ever did one, but Cab Martin hired me. It was the first time in my life that I was found out and honest about my past, and still I got the job.

  They say you can’t change the past, only overcome it. Mr. Martin will never know what that one moment means to me, and he will never know how grateful I am to him for giving me a chance at an honest life—no more hiding, no more looking over my shoulder, no more fear. I can finally look my past directly in the eye, see it clearly, and not be afraid.