60 pages • 2 hours read
Lesley Nneka ArimahWhat It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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“Second Chances” Summary
The narrator, Uche, is a woman who finished graduate school two years earlier but still needs her father to help her buy a mattress. As disappointed as she is about this, she is more upset that her father shows up with her mother, who died eight years earlier. This version of her mother resembles a photograph from 1982, which Uche later searches for in her family’s house.
Uche decides not to return to her apartment, but she can’t understand why her father and sister, Udoma, simply accept that their mother is back from the dead. Uche reflects on how she overreacted to events when she was young and often stole things. After Udoma was born, those tantrums and tendencies turned into a milder egocentrism, which sparked her last conversation with her mother.
Her mother’s death had a profound impact on Uche, who ran away to Alabama and overdosed on pills. Her father found her and had her hospitalized. It took her a year and a half to recover enough to continue her master’s degree. She only moved out on her own a year prior to the story’s opening, and she still has trouble holding a job. Udoma senses Uche’s mood and hugs her, asking why she can’t just be happy that their mother is back.
Uche avoids her sister and continues looking for the photograph, eventually finding it tucked in her father’s phone case. However, her mother is missing from the image. Uche recalls their last conversation. Udoma was flying home after a two-month visit to their aunt in Lagos, Nigeria. Uche was supposed to pick her up at the airport but fell asleep on the couch. Her mother was furious that Uche failed to retrieve Udoma. Uche apologized, but her mother said that Uche was disappointing. Uche ran out, slamming the door. She has never told anyone about this last conversation with her mother.
Uche goes to the kitchen, where her mother is cooking. She asks her daughter why she can’t just enjoy her return. Uche shrugs and goes to her room to sleep. The next morning, her mother is gone. Her father and sister are in the living room, having stayed up late talking. He sees that the photo is missing from his phone case, and Uche searches her room. She finds it crumpled up, now with her mother in it. She says the words she wishes she had said to her mother eight years ago: “I’m sorry. I love you. Please forgive me” (78).
“Second Chances” Analysis
“Second Chances” is a ghost story about unresolved family strife and How Mothers Shape Their Children. Uche is haunted not only by the literal ghost of her mother but also by the state of their relationship when her mother died.
From the start of the story, Uche makes it clear that she feels some disappointment in herself, though she does not tie those concerns explicitly to her mother. Rather, the first line positions her with regard to expectations of adult life: “[T]wo years out of grad school I’m old enough to buy my own bed and shouldn’t ask my father to chip in on a mattress” (65). While the revelation that her eight-years deceased mother has joined the shopping trip temporarily overshadows this self-shaming sentiment, Uche’s negative response to the miraculous reappearance of her mother is closely tied to her feelings of being a disappointment.
Arimah highlights the apparent strangeness of Uche’s response to her mother’s reappearance by contrasting it with those of her father and sister; where they feel delight, Uche’s words and actions suggest anger. However, it is as much anger with herself as it is anger with her mother for dying. She reflects on how she has (or has not) changed over the years, simultaneously foreshadowing her final argument with her mother and framing her insufficiencies as deeply rooted: “My childhood hysterics eventually congealed into an off-putting self-centeredness that was the topic of my mother’s and my last conversation, eight years ago” (71). Though Uche apologized for failing to pick up her sister, her mother called her “disappointing,” repeating this word three times. Her mother’s death crystallized the condemnation in Uche’s mind, compounding her sense of an unresolved issue with the heavier weights of grief and guilt.
The intensity of Uche’s response to her mother’s death underscores that she felt real love for their mother, whatever their differences. She wanted to please her mother and appease her, but her untimely death—a motif that runs throughout this collection of stories—seemingly rendered that impossible. Her mother’s miraculous resurrection provides Uche with a second chance to make things right, but she is too overwhelmed by her mother’s reappearance, and thus the re-emergence of her feelings of guilt and inadequacy, to take advantage of the opportunity. Her mother is back in the photograph by morning, but Uche’s sense that her failures date back to childhood suggests that it was (at least in her mind) always “too late” to repair the relationship; her mother’s death and disappearance merely emphasize the point.
This story is also a further entry in the collection’s examination of sisters (or cousins, as in “Wild”) with contrasting relationships with their mothers. When Udoma embraces Uche in “Second Chances,” it recalls the scene in “The Future Looks Good” when Ezinma, the caring and mild-mannered sister, tends to the injuries of Bibi, the troubled one. These examples suggest the ability of familial bonds to overcome personal discord, even as Uche’s experience with her mother would seem to imply otherwise.
