In the Land of Second Chances Paperback - 2006

Chapter 1

The Sad Edge of a Slippery Slope

My name is Wilma Porter. I own the Come Again Bed and Breakfast, which is the only B & B in Ebb, Nebraska, and the only one in Rutherford B. Hayes County that is recommended by two Internet directories. I bought the place from Clement Tucker, our very own Warren Buffett, who contracted an acute case of Midlife Crisis about five years ago and decided to build himself a modern house with all the latest conveniences.

The Come Again is a single-turreted, three-story Victorian mansion that was built by Silas Tucker the Second shortly after the Civil War. There’s a single, grand oak tree in the front that antedates the house and a black asphalt driveway leading up to a formal porte-cochere and a little parking area for my guests. Last year, I had the house painted bone white except for the roof, which is black. I think the contrast is meaningful.

Clara Tucker Booth Yune, Clem Tucker’s older sister and Ebb’s most prominent recluse, occupies the entire third floor of the Come Again on a permanent basis. There are six bedrooms on the second floor. I live in the one that faces the back garden; the other five are for rent. Each bedroom has its own bathroom; the Cornhusker Suite even has a Jacuzzi. Downstairs, there’s a living room the size of a tennis court, a parlor for the TV, a den, which I keep for myself as a rule, and a giant-sized dining room that will seat sixteen. Except for my kitchen, which is commercial grade, the entire house is decorated in beautiful old antiques that Clem Tucker left behind or I bought cheap at estate auctions and refinished myself in the basement.

Like most folks who live in Ebb, I was born right here, but about an hour after I got my high school diploma I jumped on a bus to North Platte. I came back with my two daughters after the divorce fifteen years later. Both girls are grown up and gone now. One is up in Omaha and the other is over in Council Bluffs, across the river.

By most measures, Ebb is a small town. It is the county seat, but only two thousand people live inside the city limits. There’s not a lot to do here most of the time, and that’s the way we like it. If we need some excitement, we can drive up to Lincoln. For twenty years, every politician in this area has been elected on the “No Wal-Mart, no how” platform. We take a similarly dim view of fast-food franchises, slow-food franchises, convenience-store franchises, and all other franchises with big, backlit signs in primary colors. The only exception is the new Starbucks on Main Street, but Ebb is so small that we only have the one.

All the rest of the stores on Main are unique and most of them have been in operation for more than fifty years. The biggest and most famous is Millet’s, the last remaining department store in the tri-county region. Millet’s, which is pronounced like “mill-it” and not like “mill-ay,” sits right at the corner of Bean Street and Main, where it’s been ever since Joshua Millet opened it up back in 1920. It has survived the Great Depression, rural flight, three bank bankruptcies, World War II, a flood, and God knows how many droughts and tornadoes. Now it is owned and managed by Calvin Millet, June and Joshua III’s only child. Calvin is a smart, hardworking young man, and everybody in Hayes County shops at his store as if it was a patriotic duty, but we’re all afraid that Millet’s will not survive his run of terrible bad luck.

Calvin was a homely baby, bald and sort of wedge-headed, but he grew up to be tall and handsome in a gangly, fair-haired sort of way, kind of like Gary Cooper. He was too skinny to play high school football, a form of religion in these parts, but he studied hard and got good grades even though he worked in his father’s store. After graduation, he went up to Lincoln and got himself a four-year degree in accounting, and then he joined the Air Force to see the world. They sent him to Bossier City, Louisiana.

Calvin had hardly been gone for any time at all when his parents were killed in a train accident. I could tell at the funeral that he had already started to lose his hearing. He’s fine now; he wears tiny little hearing aids in both ears, but the Air Force had to give him a medical discharge so he came back home to run the family store. A year or so later, he married Mary Beth Tucker, Clem’s only child and a bit of an airhead, but a real beauty and the catch of the county from a financial point of view. Six months after that, Lucy was born. I know what you’re thinking, but the human gestation period in rural America is only six months for the first baby. After that, it’s nine months.

When Lucy Millet was eight years old, she contracted some sort of neurological disorder. I hear it’s similar to Lou Gehrig’s disease, but more aggressive and unnaturally painful. Anyway, a real sick daughter was more than her momma could handle, so she pulled up and left for L.A. Just disappeared in the middle of the night. Took the Jeep and the dog and the George Foreman cooker and left Calvin a note saying she was real sorry.

Mary Beth’s departure caused quite a buzz at the Quilting Circle. Most of us are divorcées ourselves, so we aren’t inclined to be critical of any woman who leaves a man. In fact, we have a support system in place so that a woman can do it right: counselors, lawyers, day care, even police protection. But Mary Beth didn’t use the system, and her husband and sick daughter suffered for it. She hasn’t been welcome in these parts since.

Apparently, being a waitress to the stars was not keeping her in the manner to which she was accustomed, so Mary Beth came home anyway but just long enough to sue Calvin for divorce. Since she had only abandoned her husband and sick child in the dead of night, and taken the dog and the Jeep to boot, the court was sympathetic to her predicament. Calvin now pays her alimony. In case you were wondering, the judge is married to a Tucker, once removed.

Little Lucy Millet is the sweetest little blonde-haired girl you have ever seen and she is smart as a whip, but she isn’t getting any better. For the last three years, Calvin has flown her all over the country looking for a doctor who can cure her, but all they’ve done is slow the disease down and, according to rumor, empty the Millet bank account. Calvin has health insurance through the farmer’s co-op, just like everybody else in these parts, but most of Lucy’s treatments have been experimental, and that means that the HMO won’t pay for them. Unless somebody gets those insurance companies under control, I figure that two aspirin and a glass of water will count as a medical experiment before I’m dead.

The tornado hit last month while Calvin and Lucy were away at the Mayo Clinic. That was too early for tornadoes as a rule, but the weather has been unseasonably warm all year. Luckily, it was a tiny thing as twisters go. It missed the town and everything else in Rutherford B. Hayes County except for Rufus Bowe’s grain silo and Calvin Millet’s place. Actually, it tore the roof off of Rufus’s silo and dropped it on Calvin’s house—dead center. I drove out to see what happened with my best friend, Loretta Parsons, who is Ebb’s sole resident black person and the owner of the Bold Cut Beauty Salon. Calvin’s home was a sight to see. It looked like a pile of rubble with a great big aluminum teacup sitting in the middle of it. You wouldn’t think that anybody’s aim could be that good, not even God’s.

After the tornado, Calvin and Lucy stayed with me at the Come Again for a few days until he found them a cracker-box of a house to rent in Carson, about fifteen minutes down the road toward the Kansas line. Calvin hasn’t talked to Buzz Busby about rebuilding yet, even though that place is so small and so far away from town. I would know for sure if he had.

We’re all sad for Calvin Millet and worried sick about poor Lucy—any caring person would be—but I have to tell you the honest truth: we’re just as scared of rural America’s variety of the domino theory. If Calvin’s finances fall apart, then Millet’s Department Store will fail. If Millet’s goes under, then the county’s political resolve will collapse and we’ll get a Wal-Mart store one week later—in a ravine ten miles from nowhere because the land will be dirt cheap. The next thing you know, everybody in the county will be shopping for bargains in the ravine, so Loretta will have to shut her doors, and so will the Starbucks and every other place on Main except for the Corn Palace and the Yune Library. Then the girls won’t bring their kids back after they get divorced and that will be the end of Ebb as we know it.

You may think that I’m exaggerating, but this town is perched on the sad edge of a slippery slope. I went to church and wished to God I could help in some way, but He sent us a salesman. That’s right, a salesman. At least that’s my theory. You be the judge.

“If you’ve been charmed by Jimmy Stewart and the small-town miracles of It’s a Wonderful Life, treat yourself to this unusual little novel full of hope, humor and singular characters.”
–Parade

“A folksy, wise and gently amusing look at the importance of living life to the fullest and not only trusting in chance, but embracing uncertainty as the spice of life.”
–Rocky Mountain News

“By the end of the stranger’s six-day visit . . . Chances morphs from Fried Green Tomatoes into a wisecracking It’s a Wonderful Life.”
–Entertainment Weekly

“An accessible, engaging story peppered with characters who are eccentric, conflicted, tragic and humorous.”
–Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Just what the doctor ordered.”
–Detroit News and Free Press

George Shaffner has worked in the computer industry for twenty years, most recently as CEO or COO of three international computer companies. He is the father of three children, who are all math refugees.