Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One) (11 page)

Yeah.
Move over, Brad Pitt.
There
’s a new leading man in town.

He had qualified his love for her
,
had attached their
marriage to a condition.

Y
ears of living with an alcoholic father should have
told Ben that would never work.
Shelly couldn
’t help having her demons, her compulsions, and his
job as her fiancé was to love her anyway
but without becoming a
co-dependent
.
His mind flickered over all the times he’d taken
business calls when they’d been at dinner.
Hell, all the times he’d taken them when they’d
been in bed.
All the vacations cut
short, the dates cancelled at the last minute, the
sales
trips that were supposed
to have been two days and bled into three.
No wonder she
’
d stopped believing
that he’d be there for
her
.
No wonder she had run away.

A bell dinged.
The flight attendant said it was now permissible to
use electronic devises.
But for the
first time in years, Ben did not reach for his laptop.
Instead, he leaned back, shut his eyes, and
hoped
he would get to Shelly
before it was too late.

*****

Alanna moved swiftly and
invisibly back through the mall, wondering what the hell the saleswoman at
Tiffany’s would make of the fact that a woman had vanished almost before her eyes.
There was no way she could tell Joe what she’d done. He wouldn’t understand why
she’d been practicing materializing and dematerializing all over a shopping
mall while he’d been in the casino doing their job.

And he certainly wouldn’t
understand why she’d felt compelled to try on an engagement ring. Alanna didn’t
even understand that part herself.

She was back in the Bellagio
casino within a minute or so—travel certainly was easier without a body—and she
could see that everyone at the table where Joe and Shelly had been playing was
on their feet, all staring intently at the table where evidently something
momentous was happening.

Shelly had gone all in.
Everyone except Grateful Dead, who’d called her, had dropped out of the hand.

When Grateful Dead slid his
chips forward, Joe let out a groan that only Shelly could hear and she went
pale as a funeral lily and flipped up her cards, revealing the two jacks. The
whole table applauded and whistled, which brought others to the table to hover
in expectation of a big win. It was a Vegas superstition almost as ingrained as
the gambling. Everyone wanted to be close to a winner.

Grateful Dead turned over two
nines. A diamond and a spade.

“It’s probably okay,” Joe
whispered to Alanna, who had come up to his side. “He’s got two pair but she
has four of a kind. If we can just avoid a straight flush on the river she’s
golden.”

“I have no idea what you just
said,” Alanna told him.

“The queen of spades is the
only thing that can kill us now.”

“Not us. Her. Remember? We’re
not the ones with the gambling bug.”

“Right . . . I know but this
is a great hand. A once in a lifetime hand. You can’t help but get juiced by
it. Just look at this crowd.”

“I don’t even care about the
crowd. I just want to go home.”

“And where would that be?”
Joe asked her quietly. “If you and I wanted to go home, Alanna, where would we
go?”

Everyone at the table was
completely silent, staring at the line of cards.

The dealer turned over the queen of spades.

*****

“I told her not to go all
in.”

Morgan raised an eyebrow.

“It’s true,” Joe felt
defensive and didn’t know why they’
d
been ma
n
ifested to a meeting room. “Isn’t there some
sort of tape you can rewind, some way you can verify what I’m saying? It seems
like you people would have that sort of technology. Because I swear I told her
not to go all in.”

“I know,” Morgan said.

A light began to dawn in Joe.
“So we don’t have any control over what these people do?”

“Did I ever say that you
did?”

“So let me make sure I’ve got
this straight. We can give them their wish. I mean we can set up the situation
perfectly, wrap up everything they said they wanted and hand it to them with a
great big bow on top, but they still might
manage to blow
it?”

“You’re not God,” Morgan
said. “You can’t force anyone to do anything.”

“Can God do that? Force
people to do what’s in their own best interest?” Joe asked.

“What do you think?”

“Based on what I remember
about most people, seems like the answer would have to be no. But there’s a lot
I don’t remember.”

“It will come back to you
eventually. But, for now, you have this little problem it seems. Her name is
Shelly and she’s just a tad stubborn, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, so what you’re telling
us is we can give them their wish but they might not take it. How screwed up is
that?”

“People walk away from what
they claim to want every day,” Alanna broke in, her voice a little hollow.

“Indeed they do,” said
Morgan. He glanced at Alanna and she had the oddest sense that she could read
his mind.

This is part of what we’ve
been sent here to learn she thought. We’re supposed to see all the times in our
own lives when we were given exactly what we said we wanted, and all the times
we ruined our own chances, turned our back on possible happiness. All the times
we threw that nice wrapped up gift with the big bow right back into the face of
life. The sound of a diamond ring hitting a glass counter reverberated in her
head once again and she squirmed under the coordinator’s steady gaze. She
realized that he knew everything, that he knew how she had deserted Joe and
Shelly in the casino, that he had watched her work her way through the mall,
practicing her manifesting skills.

“But do we still get credit
for granting the wish?” Joe persisted. His own reservations about blowing the
Shelly case had faded and he was now indignant. Hell, it seemed like the odds
of winning in this game were worse than those in Vegas. “Does it go in the win
column for us, get us one step closer to completing whatever test you’re giving
us, get us closer to the next level, whatever that is?”

“This task isn’t over,”
Morgan said briskly, leaning forward in his chair. “Shelly is still in Vegas
and she needs you.”

“But she’s out of money,” Joe
protested. “How is she supposed to make the big hit without any chips?”

“Ah,” Morgan said, and Alanna
thought he was almost on the verge of a smile. “You need to think—what’s the
Earth phrase? You need to think outside the box.”

Joe wanted to ask what box
that would be, but he could already feel himself starting to fade, preparing to
manifest somewhere else. It was infuriating, this being out of control.
Infuriating and also tantalizing.

“I told her not to go all
in,” he managed to say one more time before his mouth dissolved, and the room
went silent.

Chapter Twenty-One

Shelly sat glumly at a bar in
the Bellagio lobby, sucking on a sprig of mint that she’d managed to fish from
the bottom of her mojito. There was no telling where Alanna and Joe had gone
and Shelly knew all about fair-weather friends, those people who loved you when
you were up and deserted you when you were down. Even Ben had not texted her
back.

She signaled to the
bartender, who was dressed in a lavender and peach swirly vest. He promptly
picked up his mortar and pestle and began to grind up more mint. At least he
cared about her.

“I lost a huge stack of chips
at the table today,” she informed him and he nodded solemnly. He’d heard this
story about a million times.

Shelly sighed. She was
suddenly tired and decided that whatever the afternoon held for her, perhaps it
would go better with a nap. Or maybe a swim in the pool. She had looked down
from her window this morning and seen the elaborate waterways and cascades of
the resort pool below her and yet she had not managed to get out of the
confines of the hotel during her first 24-hours in Vegas. She would go up, take
a little nap, and then hit the pool. Screw Joe and Alanna and Ben back in
Virginia, Ben who had told her not to come, Ben who said nobody ever wins and
you have to work for everything you get in life. Ben, who insisted that life
was not about a big win but about the journey and planning for the trip.

“Can I take the drink with me
to my room?” she asked, already digging for her room key in her purse. The
bartender nodded and handed her the bill to which she added a thirty percent
tip and signed. She still wasn’t clear on exactly how the hotel room and food
were being taken care of, but what possible difference could a couple of
fifteen dollar mojitos make at this stage of the game? Or a
nine
dollar tip to
the only man in the world who was still talking to her?

Shelly picked up her mojito
in her left hand and, with her right, fumbled inside her bag until she found
the room key. A room key and a single loose quarter, dropped to the bottom of
her purse. She sighed and pushed herself to her feet and, from across the broad
lobby, she could see Joe and Alanna walking toward her. She wasn’t in the mood
for Joe’s “I told you so” sermon, even though he had told her so, even if she’d
been too impulsive and had put too much on the line. Shelly looked down at the
quarter in her hand then glanced around the bar. There was a row of slots right
outside the ladies room, positioned so that men waiting for their lady friends
to freshen up wouldn’t have to miss even a minute of casino action.

Tossing her head defiantly in
Joe’s general direction, Shelly picked up her drink and headed toward the three
lone slot machines tucked in their pitiful corner. Even she knew that slots
located so far from the main drag were unlikely to pay off. The casino set the
best odds on the machines that were in crowded places, places where everyone
would hear the clanging and the bells, would get juiced and excited anew about
their own chances. That’s where you found the winners—front and center, not in
a far-flung corner of a lobby bar at slots that didn’t even have stools in
front of them.

But Joe was coming to scold
her. Shelly knew that. Men had scolded her all her life. Her dad, her big
brother, her GA sponsor, a long line of boyfriends ending with Ben. All those
men standing there with that disappointed expression saying “Now Shelly, why on
earth would you do something like that?”

She wasn’t even looking at
the slot machine. She was looking over her shoulder at Joe and Alanna who were
almost at the bar and her finger found the machine’s coin drop by instinct. She
slid the final quarter in, pushed the button to start the spin and raised her
mojito toward Joe.

“Cheers to me,” she said.
“The biggest loser in a town full of losers.”

And then the bar exploded with
the sound of clanging bells and flashing signs and whoops and hollers and a
voice from somewhere over a loudspeaker yelling Winner! Winner! Winner!

*****

People poured out of the bars
and the casinos and the hallways and the elevators and the restaurants. There
was a big winner in their midst. The thing they all craved, the thing they all
hoped for, the thing they all traveled here to have. That thing had happened.
Maybe not to them. But to somebody. And the excitement spread like a fire in
autumn leaves pulling everyone into its heat.

Shelly stood in the middle of
the crowd, the mojito still in her hand, her purse slung over her arm, her room
key between her fingers, with a look of shock on her face. Never in her dreams
of winning, in all her years of gambling and losing, had she ever contemplated
how this would feel. She only knew the temporary highs after a small win. The
lift that got her to place the next bet. And then the slide down again that put
her back in a hole. The hole was comfortable somehow. It was where she had
existed for all these years. But this. This was enormous.

She didn’t have any idea how
big she’d won. But when a line of casino employees marched her way holding a
banner that said two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Shelly’s legs began to
wobble and she felt as if her head had spun off her neck and was rotating on
its own across the room. Her eyes glazed over and she had trouble catching her
breath while her heart thumped wildly.

“Oh dear God,” she finally
managed to take a breath. And then as what happened really hit her, “Oh my
God.”

She looked toward the lobby,
in the direction from which Alanna and Joe had been approaching her, straining
to find them. But, once again, they had disappeared.