Most People Deserve a Second Chance

My nephew was a drug addict and a thief and when his parents finally threw him out, I took him in and let him live in my 2-bedroom apartment with me.  I treated him pretty good, not charging him any rent, he had his own bedroom and his own bathroom.  I had lots of cable TV channels that he could watch, and my refrigerator was always stocked up with food and beer.  I heard that he had stolen some things from his parents, but I never thought that he would take anything from me.  One day I asked him if he saw my camera and he told me that he sold it so he could get some methadone, wtf!  I paid $800 for that camera, and I hardly ever used it, except for the trip that I took to the UK.  I told his parents that I was throwing him out of my place, because I couldn’t trust him staying there anymore and that is when his father said that he would go with me to the dealer who he traded my camera to for the drugs.

My brother-in-law, my nephew and I all went to the drug dealers place, and he told us that my camera was already gone, as he sold it to someone else for $50.  My nephew got $35 worth of methadone for my $800 camera and not this slimy dealer made another $15 profit off of that.  All of my pictures from the UK were gone and I would never see my camera again.  I told my nephew that if he would have asked me for $35, that I would have just given it to him, but now he had to leave, because I didn’t want to give him a second chance.  My nephew got mad at me and told me that he was going to kick my ass, which pissed me off even more.  The last thing on earth that I wanted to do was to give this punk a beatdown, but part of me felt like he deserved it.  I did not believe that my nephew was a good person, and he certainly didn’t show that he was remorseful, so he never got a second chance with me.  If he would have given me a sincere apology, that would have been a different story, but it is hard to trust people when they are crazy out of their minds from being hooked on drugs.

Written for FOWC with Fandango – Apology and for Sadje’s Sunday Poser #83, where she asks us “Do you believe in second chances?”