The narrator and main narrator of “Second Chances” is a woman two years out of graduate school who is burdened by guilt and self-disappointment. She feels bad enough when she must ask her father to help her buy a mattress—something she feels she should be able to do herself—but when her dead mother shows up, the trauma Uche experienced after her mother’s death wells up.

Uche is hard on herself, though from her perspective, she merits it. She admits to being “a child prone to hysterics” (70), including tantrums and overreactions. As a child, she engaged in petty theft, which meant she had to spend much of her childhood in her mother’s salon. She grew out of the tantrums, but she believes she retained a tendency toward self-centeredness—a belief that Uche’s final argument with her mother affirmed, as her mother excoriated her for flipping through TV channels and falling asleep when she was supposed to pick up her sister at the airport. The argument haunts Uche with guilt because her mother’s subsequent deadly accident foreclosed any sort of closure: “The secret of it settled a cloak of guilt on me I will wear for the rest of my life” (76).