It Ain't Over (5 page)

Both women had to confront Vince’s lies, but it was Trish’s whole world that was shattered. Even as Vince was acting the part of the devoted husband and denying he’d even had an affair, he’d been continuing to see Lucy. He’d been living a double life, one with Lucy and another with Trish and the boys. Trish was more than a woman scorned now. She was a wife and a mother, deceived, betrayed, and humiliated.

“I knew nothing about her, but she knew everything about my life,” says Trish. “She knew our floors were being redone, that my mother had been in the hospital, that my sister had had a miscarriage. And worse, she’d even been to my house, when I was visiting my sister in Florida, and she and Vince had shared a bottle of wine and a tryst in my basement while the boys slept upstairs.”

That was the last straw. Trish drove two hours to her mother’s house, where she broke down. Her stepfather handed her a blank check and said, “Do what you have to do.” Trish knew what that was: She used the money to hire a lawyer and file for divorce.

Trish’s attorney advised her to get a job, and she went to work at a local bookstore while she looked for a teaching position. “It was something to do to get out of the house and stop wallowing in my sorrow,” she says. “There, busy working in a stockroom, I was able to put the angst of the divorce aside. The perpetual knot in my stomach would subside for a few hours, and I just became Trish.”

Slowly, very slowly, Trish began to rebuild herself—at first from the outside in. She got a new haircut. She lost a little weight. Then the hard work began: She joined a support group for separated and divorced Catholics,
where she met others who were struggling to reclaim their lives. They were all facing the same question: Who are you when life as you knew it is over? Trish knew she had to decide who she was going to be when she emerged, alone, from the divorce.

“My ‘outing’ as a victim helped me to acknowledge that I really didn’t want to be one,” says Trish. “I knew I was stronger than that. Each public step I took away from the marriage made it clearer to me that I was better outside of it than I was in it.

“It took a lot for me to admit that my marriage was over,” she says. “But I wasn’t sour on marriage. I had made a bad decision and would make a better one someday. I craved intimacy, I wanted a partner, but I knew that I had to become a whole person first before
I
could be a partner.”

During the difficult months of this transformation, Trish got a lot of support and advice from her mother. When Trish’s mom was widowed at just 48, she’d felt robbed of her happiness. But she had regained her footing, restarted a career, and learned to live on her own. After a while, she met a widower, married him, and took control of her life—and recaptured her happiness.

Trish had also been robbed, but she was barely 40; she had a lot of life ahead of her, and her mom encouraged her to embrace it.

“She wanted me to go for that second chance someday, if it came around,” says Trish. “She warned me not to let the rest of my life become a shrine to my failed marriage.”

Trish treasured time on the phone with her mom, much of it catching up on news from the neighborhood. One “poor kid” from Trish’s childhood, a man named Eddie, was also reeling from a failed marriage, her mom told her. His wife had walked out on him, taking their son with her, and was now making big financial demands on him.

Trish knew that “kid”—she’d dated him once, pre-Vince. And what a date
it was. Trish blushed just thinking about it, because that evening had ended with what she calls “the perfect kiss”: sitting on Eddie’s lap in his parked car, under an overpass, making out. Even now, she felt a tingle of excitement just thinking about it.

Would he look back on that night as fondly as she did? With her mom’s encouragement, Trish decided to take a chance and call him. Just hearing Eddie’s voice on the answering machine made her feel good and comfortable, and she left a hurried message. Eddie called back and said he would love to reconnect.

Over the next week they had several phone conversations, catching up and comparing notes on what it felt like to be “left.” Those chats were long and easy and soothing, and Eddie seemed genuinely interested in what Trish had to say. They agreed to meet in the city the following week.

“When Eddie met me at the car, I knew right away that things would be all right,” Trish says. “I felt an instant attraction—a connection—and I could tell he felt the same way.” The evening ended on Eddie’s terrace, where the two talked about their marriages, their sadness about their shattered dreams, their hope about the future. Throughout it all, Trish was keenly aware of how Eddie was looking at her—
really
looking at her—taking in her every word. It was what she’d been craving all along, that sense of engagement, of connection.

“At some point in the evening, I thought,
Even if there isn’t any physical contact between us, it doesn’t matter
,” says Trish. “That’s because Eddie had shown me that I was interesting and vital. I didn’t want the night to end, but it had to. And then we kissed—and it was exactly as I had remembered.”

Five years later, after “lots and lots of therapy to help me get over my fear of abandonment and learn to trust again,” Trish and Eddie were married. Surrounded by family and lifelong friends, the bride and groom felt an
overwhelming sense of peace. “And both of us kept hearing the same thing all day,” Trish says. “ ‘I’ve never seen you so happy.’ ”

Trish was that happy, and remains so today. But looking back, she knows that she’d never have reached this place had she not first done the hard work of rediscovering who she was.

“I didn’t like who I became when I was married to Vince,” says Trish. “I had changed from being an independent person to being a whiny wimp. Now I try to maintain a vision of myself as someone who’s healthy and strong, and not think of myself only as someone’s wife. And I have a husband who values that. We have common interests, and things to talk about. We are honest with each other. And everything I needed but didn’t get from my first marriage—security, intimacy, faith—is all there.”

Trish’s mom died a year after the wedding, but her spirit lives on: Trish and Eddie now share those whispers in the night. And Trish no longer tells people that her first husband left her for another woman.

“I knew I was better when I stopped saying that,” she says. “Instead I started saying, ‘I threw him out because he didn’t deserve me.’ ”

1
. The subject has chosen not to use her real name.

Heidi Ganahl, 46

Denver, Colorado

W
hen Heidi Ganahl was in her early twenties, she seemed like one of the lucky ones. Most of the big building blocks of her life were set firmly in place: She and her husband, Bion, were young, in love, and living an adventurous life in Colorado, where he was finishing his degree in business, and she had a good job as a pharmaceutical rep.

They even had a dream for a business they wanted to start together one day: a day-care center for dogs. Heidi and Bion loved their dogs, and hated leaving them behind when they traveled, but they never had much luck finding a good boarding facility for their two mutts, Winnie and Mick.

“You could either take your dog to a kennel, where all they had was a drab concrete run, surrounded by a chain-link fence,” Heidi says, “or you could take them to a vet clinic, where they’d be kept in a little box in the back. It was just horrible.”

The camp for dogs that Heidi and Bion imagined was spacious and clean,
offering loads of room for pooches to run and play together. The idea seemed so promising that they even wrote up a business plan for it. “We were both very entrepreneurial, very creative,” says Heidi. “We knew we didn’t want to have boring eight-to-five jobs, and what could be better than working together to build a business we loved?”

They each had nonboring ideas for fun, too. So for Bion’s twenty-fifth birthday, Heidi’s family treated him to a private flight in an open-cockpit “Snoopy” stunt plane. “Bion had such great energy and spirit, and normally, I did everything with him,” Heidi says, “but that day I stayed back home to help with a community garage sale, so my parents went to watch. As the pilot was doing a flyby, so that my folks could take pictures, the plane suddenly dove into the ground—right in front of them. I still remember the moment I heard the news: My brother was the one who had to come tell me that Bion had been killed.”

The marriage, the friendship, the dream—it was all gone.

Three months later, Heidi received a $1 million settlement as a result of the crash. “I come from a lower-middle-class family,” she says, “and that was a lot of money to me. At first I thought,
What good is this money if it can’t bring Bion back?
But it also gave me some solace, because I didn’t have to think too far ahead:
Okay, at least I don’t have to worry about working—I can just take care of myself.
But then it became stressful, because people were asking me for loans. I also felt guilty about having it. I kept thinking,
This isn’t the way I wanted to make money in life,
you know?”

It was a rough time. “After Bion’s death, I was in a daze. I made a lot of bad decisions,” Heidi says. Seeking comfort in a relationship, she married again within two years and gave birth to her daughter. But the marriage didn’t last—and Heidi began struggling with what to do professionally.

“I really wanted to see through the idea that Bion and I had come up with,
but people around me kept saying, ‘That will never work. You’ll just waste all of your money. Do something practical.’ ”

So Heidi complied, launching a few conventional businesses—a high-end baby-bedding catalog and a financial-management firm—but neither idea really clicked. By the fall of 2000, she was a single mother with only $83,000 of the original $1 million left in the bank—and hobbled by a growing sense of desperation.

Enough was enough, she decided. And that’s when she finally dusted off the business plan she and Bion had written a decade earlier.

“As I paged through it,” Heidi remembers, “I thought,
Man, this is good!
In every bone of my body, I knew it was exactly what I was meant to do. Ever since getting my first dog, Daisy, for my third birthday, I have always loved dogs. They don’t play emotional games—they just love you, love you, love you. They make the world a better place.”

Driven by a new energy, Heidi began to flesh out the idea. The name she came up with—Camp Bow Wow
®
—seemed perfect, and she started to visualize the space. Dogs would need to have both indoor and outdoor areas to play and socialize, places to run and places to rest. There would be separate spaces for the younger dogs to romp, while the older ones could just hang out and snooze. Also, there would be special areas for the 15-pounds-and-under set, so they wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by their larger mates.

Then Heidi hit on an ingenious idea—not for the dogs, but for their owners: She’d set up webcams throughout the facility so they could check in on their pets whenever they chose.

“We wanted to create a place where a dog could be a dog,” she says, “and where owners could feel less guilty about leaving them with us. By going online, they could watch their dogs having fun.”

Tapping into what was left from the crash settlement, Heidi opened her
first facility near downtown Denver, initially attracting clients by going to local parks with her young daughter and handing out flyers to dog owners that offered a free day at camp—enticingly accompanied by dog biscuits.

Within nine months, Camp Bow Wow
®
was hosting more than 40 dogs a day—and gaining citywide notice. Not all of it was a marketer’s dream: When a Denver newspaper reporter dropped by to do a story on the business, he walked in just as Heidi’s brother was admonishing one of the dogs: “Hey, no humping allowed!”

“What do you think they wrote as the headline on the story?” Heidi recalls with a sigh. “
No Humping Allowed at Camp Bow Wow.
”

Flea-bitten journalism notwithstanding, Heidi had clearly found something that filled a niche—and she wanted to take it to the next level.

“There’s a term for the space between $1 million in revenues and $10 million,” Heidi says, “and that’s called no-man’s-land. Nothing gets you through that except tenacity and commitment.”

Over the next few years, Heidi guided Camp Bow Wow
®
through a rapid expansion. “There were a lot of tense moments,” she says. “I wound up going through the entire $83,000 left from the settlement, plus $150,000 from two lines of credit that I had—plus, I maxed out a couple of credit cards. There were a few times when I didn’t think I was going to make payroll. But I was so completely committed that we survived all our close calls. In fact, the one piece of advice I would give to anyone thinking about starting a business is this: Make sure that it’s something you are truly passionate about, because you will eat, live, and breathe it 24/7.”

Today, Heidi is remarried (her husband, Jason, is a chef on the professional barbecue circuit) and she’s feeling blessed by her professional success. The business idea she and Bion had dreamed up all those years ago has gone well beyond the $10 million mark they had fantasized about. Now a $60
million business, Camp Bow Wow
®
is the largest dog-care franchise in the world, with 150 camps in 40 states and Canada. The company has also added a home-care service, dog training, and an animal adoption service.

“It’s been a long, tough road for me,” Heidi reflects, “but life wasn’t meant to be stagnant or easy. When you go through difficult times, you really learn who you are, who your friends are, and how to find your passion in life. I’ve had my share of ups and downs, but I’d rather have had the highest of highs and lowest of lows than a boring, uneventful life. The getting-through part—that’s what has created my resilience and my belief in myself.

“And I’ve known love. A lot of it. From my children, my husband, family, and friends—and from a dear man I will never forget, who dreamed this dream with me so many years ago.”