Second Chance

In this first novella of the Second Chance series, an older gay man who has lived a closeted life for ninety-two years is presented with choices one last time. Who hasn't wondered how things might have turned out if only they'd made one or two different choices in their lives? Who hasn't contemplated what it would be like for the chance to do things all over again a different way, if only that were possible?

When ninety-two year old Andy Walker shuffles out to his beloved vegetable garden one morning in June, he gets the surprise of his life. He winds up in the last place he could ever imagine, with the man of his dreams telling him there's still time for a second chance and there's still time for him to choose a different path than the one he's already followed...but only if he's willing to take the risk and revisit one of the most pivotal and painful moments of his life. There are no guarantees or promises of happily-ever-after, and no one can make Andy's choices for him. And if he agrees to return to the year 1950 when he was still young and strong and handsome, only he will know whether or not it's possible to alter the course of his entire life thanks to one unusual encounter with a stranger named Chip.

Second Chance

Even though Andy Walker would be turning ninety-three years old in a couple of weeks he wasn't the kind of old man who could sit in a chair and stare out a window all day. In spite of numerous requests to move into one of those assisted living facilities from his only living relative, a seventy year old niece who lived in Chicago and visited two or three times a year, Andy planned to die at the ranch in Montana where he'd lived most of his life.
He still had decent eyesight, his hearing wasn't that bad on a good day, and he only needed a cane on days when his hip really bothered him. He had a cleaning woman twice a week who did laundry, prepared meals, and went over the entire house. And a caretaker who mowed, weeded, white-washed, and handled what Andy didn't feel safe doing anymore. He even drove into town two or three times a week in the same Jeep Cherokee he'd had for over twenty-five years.
Andy wasn't a profound or deeply religious man. The one thing he'd noticed as he'd passed through life was the way he kept losing things that seemed so insignificant when he'd been younger, but continued to grow more important as he'd aged. He'd started out noticing he'd lost a cheap tie clip, or a pair of cufflinks, or a page of sheet music he'd once enjoyed playing. Then one day he noticed he was losing his hair at the temples. By the time he noticed he'd lost the tight skin tone on his thighs and everything sagged and creased, he decided to hold on to the things over which he had control for as long as possible.
One of those things was his small vegetable garden next to the barn where Andy and his late wife had once boarded and trained horses. When Andy and Sarah June Walker had purchased the working ranch in western Montana many years earlier thanks to a cash wedding gift from his in-laws, Andy had always found time to plant a small vegetable garden in a long narrow section near the barn he'd surrounded with a white picket fence and chicken wire. The garden became his sanity sometimes. He would go there to forget about all he'd missed in life and all he'd sacrificed to do the right thing. In his case, doing the right thing had been marrying a nice girl he'd gotten into trouble one night when he'd been too drunk to remember what he'd been doing. When the baby that had changed the entire course of his life was delivered still born he was already married and there wasn't much to do but settle into the life he'd chosen.