Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One) (6 page)

“See that chart?” Morgan
asked, his voice deep and resonant. Not expecting an answer, he continued, “The
grid over it represents all the choices and consequences of Shelly’s life to
date.”

“Wow,” Joe leaned in to the screen
to study it closely. “She was fourteen when she bet on a horse with her father.
And look here,” he pointed to three overlapping grid blocks. “On her twenty-first
birthday she lost every cent she had on a poker hand at a girls poker night party.
This is unbelievable.”

They sat and watched Shelly’s
story play out before them like a movie. The smart girl from the poor family,
the girl who grew up watching her daddy wait for the big hit that never came.
They saw the math scholarship to college. They watched how the credit card
companies had lined up along the sidewalk leading to where the freshmen
registered for classes. A sweatshirt if you apply for this card. A teddy bear
for that one. And Shelly had stopped to pick up every form.

They saw the car loan and the
clothes she needed to buy to feel that she fit in. The bank loan for sorority dues,
another loan to pay for spring break in Cancun. All the other girls were going.
All the other girls had daddies at home to pay the bills.

“She was always trying to be
something she wasn’t,” Alanna murmured.

“Why didn’t she want her
friends to know she was on a scholarship?” Joe asked. “It’s like she was
ashamed of being a math whiz, and hell, she should have been proud. She’s been
dumbing it down her whole life.”

Before the words were barely
out of his mouth they saw the large data analysis company offering Shelly a job
right out of college. She accepted, thinking she would make enough money to pay
off her loans and get her head above water. It was one of those quirks of fate
that Shelly could create a spreadsheet or graph, plug in thousands of numbers,
predict the outcomes of numerous sets of data, but could not keep enough money
in her own bank account to cover her bills. Even though she’d gotten multiple
raises in the six years since she’d been out of college, bonuses at Christmas,
and even a large reward for figuring out a way to save a client millions of
dollars. Still, somehow she was always broke. Even her interest in the lottery
was based on a mathematical model she’d worked out. The fact that she hadn’t
won a big prize only made her more certain that she was due. To Shelly, it was
a mathematically predictive outcome.

“It’s so weird,” Joe said.
“She didn’t get into this mess because she’s stupid. She got into it because
she’s smart.”

“Do we all have grids like
this?” Alanna asked.

Morgan stopped at a red light.
“Now you begin to see the bigger picture. When a person’s life is in turmoil,
they wish for some way to fix it. You two can grant the wish. But does that
solve their problem?” He shrugged and turned around to look at them.

“Not so far,” Joe said. “When
I was at that gas station, I had this very strong urge to tell her who we are
and why we showed up in her life. Is that something we shouldn’t do?”

“Not at all,” said Morgan. “In
fact, that is your next step. Explain to her who you are and what you’ve been
sent to do. Here’s your stop.”

He let them out on a
nondescript corner across from an apartment building and prepared to drive
away. Alanna stood hopelessly on the corner, staring across the street. Is this
where Shelly lived? Joe, because, he was Joe and not a houseplant, still had what
he considered a major question that he wanted answered. So, before Morgan
disappeared again, in his most strident courtroom objection voice he blurted
out, “Hey what about us? What’s in all this for us?”

Chapter Ten

The clock on her wall said
precisely five twenty-five when Shelly stumbled into her apartment and turned
on the TV. The answering machine light was pulsing steadily and she slapped it
before going into the kitchen to pour herself a nice big glass of wine. Ben’s
voice poured out of the machine. Six calls, each more insistent than the last. She
needed to phone him. He shouldn’t have stormed off like this. They were in this
together. There were ways to work it out. He’d go with her to GA. He should
have been going with her from the start. It was his fault too, in a way. He
never should have given her the money.

I’m grateful that he called,
she thought, as she plopped down on the couch with her wine. But she could see
where all this was headed. He was going to keep her on a short leash from now
on, even shorter than before. Treat her like a child and not a wife. Take away
her credit cards, put her on some kind of cash allowance. She was a math whiz,
for God’s sake. She handled millions of dollars at her job. She wasn’t going to
be one of those pitiful women paying for their clothes and shoes with cash,
saying “My husband would die if he knew,” and looking guilty just for living.

No, it was good that Ben was
back, but Ben was going to have to start treating her like more of an equal.
And her journey to equality would proceed in precisely—she glanced at the
clock—two minutes.

Shelly scanned the stacks of
lottery tickets, filed by number, all around her and drained the glass of wine.
Here goes.

A commercial for trucks
ended. Then one about regularity. Shelly tapped her fingertips against the wine
glass.

And then . . .

And then the end of
everything. Because the Lotto show opened not with the usual spinning of the numbers,
the smiling Vanna White look-alike who Shelly considered one of her best
friends. It opened with a shower of confetti and a flashing notice of WINNER
WINNER WINNER. And a shot of a grinning middle-aged black guy in a suit handing
an oversized check to some fat white woman who was weeping tears of joy and
astonishment.

Thirty million dollars to
some nameless woman wearing a tent dress.

Some woman who wasn’t Shelly.

The phone rang. The machine
took it. Ben’s voice again. Was she there? Please answer, he said. We need to
talk about this. Please pick up.

Shelly stood up, scooped up
the stacks of tickets, walked numbly to her sliding glass door. Stepped out on
the balcony. Below her there were people walking their dogs, chasing their
kids, living their lives. Her gaze fell on a young couple, a man and woman
sitting on a bench. They were looking up at her. All these happy people, she
thought. Why can’t I be one of them?

Come on, Shelly, Ben’s voice
continued to plead. We can go to GA tonight. I’ll drive you.

Oh yeah, that’s all she
needed, for Ben and Marcus to meet. If the two of them joined forces, she’d
never draw another free breath in her life.

I know you can’t help it
baby, Ben’s voice said. I know you’re sick.

Shelly tossed the lottery
tickets up in the air and watched a breeze take them, watched them float like
small feathers down to the ground beneath her. A confetti parade of twenty-five
hundred tickets. Twenty-five hundred dollars. Twenty-five hundred chances to
make things right, and all of them gone.

Wait a minute. Not
twenty-five hundred. Twenty-four hundred ninety-nine. She still had her Vegas
Chance card, securely zipped into the side pocket of her purse. Shelly exhaled,
wiped away the tears, shut out the sight of the tickets swirling slowly to the
ground, the steady drone of Ben’s voice. She’d skipped work today, hadn’t she?
They could do without her for a couple more. She could always call in and use
the rest of her sick days. Damn him for being so smug and superior. Damn Marcus
too, and the lady who’d taken her thirty million.

It didn’t matter. None of it.
She still had one last chance to make it right.

She was going to Vegas.

Chapter Eleven

Alanna found herself manifested
to an airplane seat. First class, judging by the wide armrests and plush
cushions and that her knees weren’t pushed up to her nose. Shelly was seated
beside her and evidently they’d been talking for some time based on the
confidential way Shelly was leaning towards her, telling her life story
complete with big looping arm gestures,
prattling on about fate and how she believed
that whatever happened was meant to be. Okay, so getting her to open up
wouldn’t be a problem, Alanna figured. It didn’t hurt that Shelly had been
drinking. Three empty wine glasses were lined up on her seatback tray and the
plane hadn’t even left the ground.

It must be her first time
flying first class, Alanna thought. The newbies are always dazzled by the free
alcohol. She’d no sooner thought the thought than it shamed her. Maybe Joe was
right, and she was used to money, but there was another clue hidden somewhere
within that thought too, wasn’t there? Evidently in her previous life she’d not
only flown first class, but frequently enough that it no longer impressed her.
Alanna glanced around the cabin. God only knew how she’d gotten through
security and onto the plane or what name her ticket was under. She was flying
on a need-to-know basis and all she needed to know right now was that the
powers that be had seated her beside Shelly who was so hyped up with the thrill
of first class that she was spilling her guts and very nearly her cabernet.
Alanna turned back toward Shelly and willed herself to concentrate more closely
on the girl’s story.

“You see how he is. He
doesn’t want me on this plane. He doesn’t want me buying Lotto tickets. He
doesn’t want me in Vegas,” Shelly was saying. “No way. He agrees with everyone
else at GA. I even asked him to come along to see for himself what I won. But
there’s no way he would have taken three days off and come with me even before
we had that awful fight. Workaholic.”

“Well, it’s good for a man to
have ambition.”

“You think?” Shelly drained
the wine glass and signaled to the flight attendant as if she were a waitress.
They had to be close to take-off but the woman, with a slight, nearly
invisible, shrug, turned back into the cabin to get Shelly another drink. It
was probably long past when they should be handing out drinks but evidently the
airline bent the rule for first class, especially on flights to Vegas. Shelly
was hardly the only person in the cabin who’d begun to celebrate early.

“I mean yeah, you’re right,”
she was saying. “Ambition’s good, but does he have to work all the time? He
says it would take ten men working a hundred hours a week to keep me up in the
manner I expect to live, but that’s not true. I’m not materialistic. I just
like nice things, you know? I mean everyone likes nice things. Not that they’re
essential all the time. I wish he would have come to Vegas. Just this once.”

“Hmmm . . .” Alanna murmured,
leaning back so that the flight attendant could hand Shelly the new glass of
wine and take the empties. It was all she could think of to say, but evidently
all that was needed.

“It’s not even that I have to
have nice things,” Shelly prattled on. “I mean, of course I like to shop and
eat out, but who doesn’t? And of course I could get used to this.” She gestured
around the cabin with another wide sweep of her arm, nearly sending the wine
into Alanna’s lap. “ Oops,” Shelly giggled. “But it isn’t just about things for
me. I want the rush of the win, but Ben would never understand that. Me, I like
excitement. He likes security. Maybe we’re doomed, like Charles and Diana,
opposites with nothing in common. But I do love him. Really I do. He takes care
of everything and he wants to take care of me. I just can’t seem to give up on
taking chances. I think he’s a bit of a gambler, too, taking a chance on me.”

Shelly reached over to
squeeze Alanna’s arm, already on the brink of that sloppy sentimentality too
much liquor can bring on, and Alanna wondered precisely how long this flight to
Vegas would last. Still, there was something vulnerable and appealing about Shelly
and how excited she was to have her big adventure.

“When you said you wanted the
big wind . . .”

“Not big wind, silly, the big
win
. Slots are my game. You pull the handle and the whole world spins
before your eyes and for a moment you feel—you feel bigger than you are, you
know. You feel like a different person. Like anything’s possible. All my life
people have been telling me what I can’t do. Why what I crave is impossible.
Well that’s why I’m going to Vegas. I want to do the impossible for once. And
screw GA.”

“And GA stands for . . .”

“Gambler’s Anonymous. Ben
insisted on it the last time I ran up a few little debts. But I don’t have a
problem, not really. I wasn’t like those other people, all those sad old people
addicted to race tracks or hanging out at the bingo parlors every night.”
Shelly gave a delicate shudder. Her hoop earrings bounced. “I only went a few
times. You know where you fit and you know where you don’t, am I right?”

Shelly looked proudly around
the first class cabin again, clearly sure this was the first step in the life
she was truly destined to lead. Alanna nodded numbly. The plane had pulled back
from the dock and onto the runway now and the engines beneath them were rumbling
louder, takeoff only a few minutes away. The flight attendant bustled around
collecting glasses, making sure trays were stowed, electronics off, everything
buttoned up for liftoff.

“Ben doesn’t like it,” Shelly
said again, more to herself than to Alanna. “But how much of an explanation do
I even owe him?”