Hildy went on to explain that she had decided that she would never use her third wish. The punishment the sorcerer had inflicted on the genie must stop, and stop now. The way she saw it, if she never wished again, the genie could start to take control of his own destiny.
‘‘Do you mean you wish to employ me as your domestic—for the next sixty or so years?’’ he asked, not sounding particularly enthusiastic.
Hildy choked on the wine she was sipping. ‘‘No! I want you to have your own life, doing that ‘job of work’ you spoke of. You will remain out of your bottle. Get your own residence—you can’t stay with me and Mike. It would be awkward, worse than awkward. Impossible! But those are details we can work out. What do you think of the principle?’’
For once, Tony G. was at a loss for words. When he finally spoke, he said, ‘‘Thank you for the thought. But something may happen where you need to use your third wish. You have every right to do so. I won’t hold it against you. However, if until that time I can enjoy some freedom, be my own man again, I would be eternally grateful—and grateful for eternity that I had the chance.’’
Tears came into Hildy’s eyes. ‘‘Tony G., I swear to you, I promise you, I give you my word, I will never use that wish. I understand the challenges life brings, its joys and its sorrows. I might not want to face the bad things, but using magic to avoid painful consequences or to get what I want isn’t right. In the end, it’s how each of us deals with our fate that determines who we are. You see?’’
‘‘I think that was a pretty speech, and I know you think you mean it—’’
‘‘I know I mean it,’’ Hildy interrupted. ‘‘That’s the end to this discussion. You know, I feel so much better. Now you can have a life, and my life can get back to normal. No more abracadabra.’’ She stood up, did a neck roll, shook out her beautifully razor-cut hair. Then she winked at Tony G. ‘‘But some of this has been fun, hasn’t it? Now let’s take what’s left of this genie-brewed wine into the sunporch, toss around some ideas about what you can do with your life, and wait for Mrs. Baier to bring back my cats.’’
Hildy and Tony G. finished off their glasses of wine and newly filled glasses replaced the empty ones. Hildy had gotten a slight buzz and felt totally relaxed. She hadn’t realized how deeply stressed she had been until now, when the wine did its own kind of magic. It was making her sleepy too.
‘‘You know, I’ve been up since dawn. I think as soon as Mrs. Baier comes, I’ll take a short nap,’’ she announced. ‘‘I’m going to put on an old T-shirt and some shorts. As soon as that carrier arrives, Shelley, Keats, and I are hitting the sack.’’
Hildy went into the other room, rummaged around in her closet, and changed. She came back into the sunporch with her feet bare and her shorts hidden by her oversized, favorite threadbare and faded Nittany Lions shirt. She felt almost like her old self again—a bit of a tipsy old self, she thought, and smiled.
She looked at her wineglass. She noticed there was just a swallow left in the bottom.
Why waste perfectly good wine?
she thought. She picked it up to take the last swallow.
Meanwhile Tony G. stood motionless, his thoughts far away, one of his huge hands on the sword at his side, the other holding his wineglass. Uncharacteristically he had a goofy smile on his face. He had gotten his own wish, at least for a while, and he couldn’t believe his luck.
The doorbell rang.
‘‘My cats!’’ Hildy cried, and still holding the wineglass, she ran to the door. She flung it open.
It wasn’t Mrs. Baier. Mike stood there on the doorstep.
‘‘Mike? I didn’t think it was you,’’ she cried.
Mike looked at the wineglass in her hand. He smelled the alcohol on her breath. He glared at the smarmy Italian Count Arigento, as he knew him, standing large as life behind her in the room—in what looked like nightwear. ‘‘Evidently not. Your boyfriend is still wearing his bathrobe.’’ He spun around and stomped toward the Chevy Suburban he had just left.
‘‘Wait!’’ Hildy cried. ‘‘You’re wrong. It’s not what you think it is!’’
Mike stopped at the driver’s door and turned. He looked at her with eyes of pain. ‘‘No, Hildy.
You’re
not what I thought you were.’’ He got in and without looking back, drove away.
Hildy stood there in shock. Her first frantic, desperate thought was that she had to stop Mike. She had to catch up with him and explain. But her second thought was more a feeling, of being terribly, utterly let down.
She shut the door and walked back into the sunporch. She realized that sure, seeing Tony G. here looked bad, but Mike should have let her explain. If he loved her, he should have trusted her. If he loved her, he should have believed her. If he loved her, he should not have walked away.
‘‘I’ll go speak with him,’’ Tony G. offered. ‘‘I’ll give him the old razzle-dazzle. He’ll see what I really am.’’
Hildy shook her head. ‘‘No. Let him go. He should know me better than that. If he loves me, he’ll come back. He’ll want to talk this out. He won’t leave things like this. If he doesn’t really love me, then it’s better I found out now. I can put the past behind me and finally move on.’’
Tony G. didn’t really agree. He figured the guy acted like any normal guy would in the same situation.
‘‘Hey, Tony,’’ Hildy said in a quiet little voice as she started to walk out of the room. ‘‘Would you mind waiting for Mrs. Baier? I’m going to lie down and take a nap.’’
The genie nodded and said he’d be glad to. He felt terrible about what had happened. He thought someone like Hildy, who had the softest heart of any human he had ever encountered, deserved better luck.
Hildy went up the ladder to her sleeping loft. She really wasn’t tired anymore. She just didn’t want Tony G. to see her cry.
Chapter 30
Hildy was about to find out that her sister, always older and mostly wiser, had an entirely different view of the whole situation.
After lying up in the loft sobbing her eyes out for maybe ten minutes, Hildy decided that crying wasn’t making her feel any better. Talking with Corrine might give her some much-needed sympathy and emotional support. After all, nobody understood her better than her own sister.
Hildy called Corrine, who had just turned off Oprah, and relayed the whole miserable scenario, word for word, minute by minute. Then Hildy got to the part when she said to Tony G., ‘‘And if Mike really loved me, he would have let me explain—’’
At that point Corrine’s patience totally evaporated. ‘‘Are you nuts? What was there to explain? He found you drinking with a guy, who he thought you were dating, who was wearing a toga, which not unreasonably Mike thought was a bathrobe. What was he supposed to think?’’
‘‘But he was wrong,’’ Hildy insisted. ‘‘You know that. I’m not dating Count Arigento. Count Arigento doesn’t even exist.’’
‘‘Exactly! And Count Arigento is really Tony G.—who is a
genie.
Not a guy.
A genie who lives in a bottle!
What is the matter with you, Hildy? This is not rocket science. You take the bottle, with Tony G. in it. You go to Mike’s hotel room. You knock on the door, and when he answers, you say, ‘Watch!’ You pull out the cork. Bam! Smoke comes pouring out of the bottle and turns into Tony G. You say, ‘See, he’s not a guy, he’s a two-thousand-year-old genie.’ It worked for me, didn’t it? And that’s the end of the misunderstanding.’’
‘‘Cor-reeeene. It’s the end of the misunderstanding, but Mike is going to call security to have me put in the loony bin.’’
‘‘Hildy, trust me, he’s not. Once he regains consciousness, because he’s going to faint dead away on the floor same as I did, you can explain the whole thing right from the beginning. And you know how you end the conversation? You said Tony wants a job? Ask Mike to hire him. I mean, who could be a better detective than a genie? Hildy, are you listening to me?’’
Hildy let out a deep sigh. ‘‘I guess it can’t hurt to try.’’
Actually, Corrine’s idea might have worked, if Mike had been in the hotel room after Hildy managed to get the room number and find the floor and knock on the right door. She had the genie’s bottle in her hand, and she was all ready to pull out the cork.
But Mike didn’t answer the door. Kiki did.
Something like a snarl came out of Kiki’s mouth. ‘‘What do you want?’’
‘‘I came to see Mike. Is he here?’’ Hildy said, trying to peer around Kiki to see for herself whether Mike was lurking inside. She would have been angry if he was, but it would have leveled the playing field in a way.
‘‘He’s out. He’ll be back though—to be here with me.’’ She gave Hildy a smirk.
Hildy heard a muffled voice from inside the bottle say, ‘‘Don’t fall for it. She’s full of crap.’’
So Hildy said, ‘‘I don’t think so. He told me he had broken things off with you the day before yesterday.’’
‘‘It was just a lover’s quarrel. I mean, he had just screwed me every which way to Sunday that same morning . . . and honey, he was a tiger. He didn’t even put a condom on because he wanted this to be the time he gave me a child.’’
The muffled voice said, ‘‘Didn’t happen. Bet on it.’’
‘‘I don’t believe you. Look, I thought Mike was here. He’s not. I’m going to go.’’
Kiki’s hand darted out and held Hildy’s arm, her red nails digging into Hildy’s flesh. ‘‘Wait just a minute. You think I don’t know he slept with you? Well, he told me all about it
and I forgave him.
He was so grateful. I mean, what would he want with a country bumpkin like you? And he’s going to be so thrilled when I tell him I’m pregnant.’’
She gave Hildy another smirk.
Hildy shook her arm loose from this shrew’s grip. She stood up as tall as all five feet four inches in Teva sandals would allow. She squared her shoulders. She looked Kiki in the eye and said, ‘‘If you’re pregnant, it’s not Mike’s. And if you try to pretend it is, I’ll make sure he knows you slept with Count Arigento . . . without a condom.’’
Kiki’s mouth fell open; then she shut it fast. ‘‘The count told you that? Well, it’s my word against his, now isn’t it.’’
‘‘No, it isn’t. Count Arigento was kind enough to let me see the photos he took with his camera phone of your . . . your performance. And as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, now isn’t it?’’
‘‘Oh, the hell with it!’’ Kiki screeched. ‘‘You want Mike, you can keep him! He wasn’t ever any good in bed anyway!’’ And she slammed the door in Hildy’s face.
‘‘Maybe not with you, he wasn’t,’’ Hildy said to herself and smiled.
Jimmy the Bug had returned to Ocean City an angry man. His best-laid plans had been flushed down the crapper. The construction machine thefts, the best scam he had ever devised, had been busted. His most loyal henchmen had landed either in the slammer or the hospital. But was he dispirited? Was he depressed?
Hell no. That was not Jimmy the Bug’s style. He wanted vengeance. An eye for an eye. And he knew if he got the genie back, the reversals of fortune that had occurred in the last few days wouldn’t matter. He’d be on top of the world, where he always dreamed he’d be.
So he picked up the phone and put the order out, through his family in Scranton: Grab Hildy Caldwell’s sister Corrine. He needed her alive for a while, but as soon as he had what he wanted, he would send word to have her killed.
Then he got into his white Cadillac CTS, put a cat carrier in the trunk, and began part two of his twisted but foolproof plan.
Mike Amante drove back to Atlantic City a sorely troubled young man. He knew what he had seen. He knew what Jake had told him. But he couldn’t make sense of any of it. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t seen Hildy in years. Through his mother, he had kept tabs on everything she did. Which wasn’t much. Until this summer, she had lived with her cats and led a modest, if terribly dull, uneventful life.
The Hildy Caldwell he knew did not cavort with gangsters. She didn’t have illicit affairs. She never told a lie. And she loved him; he had no doubts that she did.
Maybe he should have waited for her explanation. But seeing her with Count Arigento split his heart with white-hot pain.
Now, his mind in turmoil and his emotions trampled, he wasn’t sure what to do, but finally he felt a tug inside telling him to return to Trump Plaza. He needed to get his stuff out of the hotel room. Then maybe he’d make a decision. He parked the rental car in the hotel’s garage. He went through the casino, arrived at the elevators, and pushed the call button. The light over one of the closed doors flicked on. The brushed steel doors slid open.
Hildy stood there in the elevator car, a stunned look on her face, the weird bottle she cared about so much in her hand.
‘‘Hildy? What are you doing here?’’ Mike asked, incredulous. This was still another coincidence, and he just couldn’t explain them anymore.
‘‘Mike! I went to your hotel room, to talk to you. Please, I can explain everything. It may sound hard to believe. But I need you to trust me.’’ Her eyes pleaded, but her voice held firm.
The elevator doors started to shut. Mike stuck his foot in them and they opened again. But he was determined not to stick that same foot in his mouth. He entered the elevator. He hit the button for his floor. He took Hildy in his arms. ‘‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have walked away without hearing you out.’’
‘‘And I should have told you everything earlier,’’ she said.
‘‘Yes, I think you should have. But whatever it is, it’s okay. Let’s go to my room and we can talk, really talk.’’ He glanced up at the floor indicator. ‘‘We’re almost there.’’
‘‘Ah, I don’t think going to your room is a good idea,’’ Hildy said.
Mike laughed. ‘‘I promise to behave.’’
‘‘It’s not that.’’ Hildy smiled. She really wouldn’t have minded.
‘‘What then?’’ he asked.
‘‘Kiki’s there, and she’s not taking the breakup very well.’’
Mike couldn’t help himself. He grinned. ‘‘I take it you spoke to her.’’