He was already standing in baggage claim when she came through the automatic doors —talking on his cell, of course—and waved her over but kept talking. Okay, it was going to be one of those days. Snippets of conversation interrupted by calls and texts and whatever. I’ll find the right moment, Shelly thought. But her shoulders sagged a bit and she felt like the girlfriend who arrives at the bar to find her boyfriend chatting up a long legged beauty wearing a short skirt.
When he finally shoved his phone in his pocket, Shelly had lost some of her nerve but she plowed ahead.
“Benji,” she began.
But Ben was still wound up from his trip and broke in to tell her about the training in Saint Louis, the new members of his team, and how the company’s profits were looking good this quarter.
“And guess what?” he finally asked.
“Ben,” she repeated, and this time she didn’t use her pet name for him. “I have something to tell you.”
He grinned. “Let me guess. You missed me so much you could hardly stand it. But I’m back now. Maybe we should skip lunch. Go back to my place.” His smile and the look of mischief on his face told Shelly exactly what he thought he knew.
“Will you listen? I want to tell you about something. About me. Something you don’t know that . . .” This wasn’t going well and Shelly stalled. Then she took a deep breath and thought, I might as well just spit it out.
“Damn. What’s the hold up with these bags? I swear it takes longer to get your luggage than it does to make the flight. Okay, wait. Here we go. About time.” Ben reached down to the conveyor belt for his suitcase and put his other arm around her. “What were you saying, babe?”
May as well wait until we’re outside, Shelly thought. Only an idiot would try to confess in the middle of an airport. She and Ben walked to her car where he put his suitcase in the back seat along with, she was relieved to note, his jacket. That meant his cell phone would be out of reach for the length of the ride.
They climbed in and she cranked the car which made a sputtering howl of protest at being prodded back into service and she slowly backed out of the parking place. Funny that she felt fine taking some risks, but was an unusually cautious driver. Ben was always kidding her about going forty-five in a fifty zone.
“Okay,” he said. “Your news first.”
She took a deep breath. “It’s just this. Remember the money you gave me? For the inn? Well instead of taking it out there I bought Lotto tickets with it.”
He merely stared at her. “You did what?”
“I've got twenty-five hundred of them in my purse. No wait, twenty-four hundred and ninety-nine to be precise. And I thought one of them was going to pay off, I really did, because . . .”
His hand came down like a claw across the steering wheel. “Stop the car,” he said.
She had never heard his voice so cold, so flat.
But there was no arguing with the tone. She looked around the parking garage and pulled into the first space she came to, a handicapped spot. Appropriate, she thought.
They both sat for a minute staring straight ahead at the concrete wall. Finally he spoke.
“Why in the name of God,” he said. “Would you spend the money for our engagement dinner on lottery tickets?”
“Super Lotto, honey. The pot’s up to thirty mill-“
“Michelle,” he said and it occurred to her suddenly, like a child, that he was really angry. He never called her Michelle. Never. “I’m not asking you how big the pot is. I’m asking you why you felt the urge to gamble our engagement on a purse full of lottery tickets.”
Gamble their engagement? Was that what she had done? Was he saying he wasn’t going to marry her now? Panic began to bubble up in Shelly’s throat.
“Because I thought I could parlay that money into enough to pay off my debts and get out of this situation I’m in. I’ve wanted to do that for years now. I’m always behind the eight ball and I never get clear. So I thought this time I could do it. Get clear. But, um . . .”
Ben was still staring at the concrete wall in front of them. “What sort of debts are we talking about? Credit cards?”
Credit cards? He still wasn’t getting it. He thought she’d spent too much on shoes and lunches out with the girls. Shelly took a deep breath, struggled to get control of herself. “Everything,” she finally gasped. “Yeah, credit cards and the car loan, and insurance, and a bank credit line, and rent, and-“
“How did you get so far behind? I know what you make . . .” Ben leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Oh, I see,” he finally said and his voice was tired. “I thought you said all this was behind us.”
This is the longest we’ve ever talked without his cell phone ringing, Shelly thought, in some abstract part of her mind that was looking down at the scene from a faraway place. I guess it doesn’t pick up a signal in the parking garage. Okay, he’s furious, but at least I’ve got his attention, so I may as well say it all.
“I know you’re angry,” Shelly began again. “I know I shouldn’t have done it. And I know you’re disappointed and everything but it worked out okay in the end. Because I did win something. Something really terrific. See I met this guy at a gas station on the way here. It just happened. Like it was destined.” She was rattling on now, talking fast as the whole thing tumbled out like falling leaves until she stopped.
“So you’re saying you gambled away the deposit for our engagement party on lottery tickets—or excuse me Super Lotto tickets—and then with your last dollar bought another ticket at a gas station because some jerk told you it would be a winner? Shelly, you must be insane.”
“But I won. Don’t you see? It was all worth it. I can cash in the three thousand in chips and still have five hundred left to win out there. And when we get to Vegas . . .”
“Vegas? Do you honestly think I would go with you to Vegas knowing that you’re a compulsive gambler? I can’t even begin to tell you how many ways that is wrong. And the fact that I have to explain it to you, especially after all our discussions about this. And after you agreed to go to GA and you promised . . .”
“We can talk about it over lunch,” she said. They just needed to get out of this awful garage and go somewhere sunny and nice. Then he would calm down. He would start to understand.
“I don’t want any lunch,” Ben said, his voice finally moving from cold to angry. “My God, I’ve spoiled you like a child, haven’t I? You announce something like this, just blurt it out to me in a parking garage, and think we’re just going to go to lunch. And then you’ll jolly me right out of this bad mood, won’t you, Shelly? Is that what you think? I’m surprised you didn’t tell me in bed.” Ben unhooked his seat belt and pushed open the car door. “I need some time. I’m going to take a cab home. We’ll talk later.”
“But Ben if you’ll only . . .”
“Later, Shelly. After I have a chance to calm down.” He flung open the back door and pulled out his suitcase and jacket.
Shelly’s heart began to pound and she was aware that her palms were cold and clammy. She couldn’t think straight. All she could picture was Ben walking away and her never seeing him again. Only one thought kept repeating in an endless loop in her mind. I shouldn’t have told him, I shouldn’t have told him. She opened her mouth, wanting to ask him to get back in the car, to stay with her, to let her try to explain. But no sound came out and it was as if she had suddenly been struck silent by an unseen hand.
Chapter Nine
Joe and Alanna had watched the whole thing from a cab sitting in a line of cabs in front of the airport baggage claim exit doors. They watched Ben walk back toward the airport and robotically get into the first cab in line. They watched Shelly climb out of her Mustang and call something to him, a question that would forever go unanswered. And they watched her then lean against the hood of her car, sobbing.
“Well we’re off to a great start,” Alanna said hollowly. “We’ve been on the job I would estimate about three hou
rs and we’ve ruined her life.”
Joe slammed his hand against the cab door. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I don’t know why I ever said the words ‘Vegas Chance’ to her. Where the hell did that even come from?”
“It’s not your fault,” Alanna said absently, patting his arm while her gaze was still focused on Shelly. The girl was the very picture of despair and she wanted to go over and comfort her. “I should have been there to help you and I don’t know why I wasn’t. It seems like I spent the whole morning riding around in this stupid cab, but I don’t know why.”
“You’d have to have handled it better than I did,” Joe said, his gaze also locked on Shelly. He remembered he never could stand to see a woman cry.
“The lady will get her chance,” said a familiar low voice. The cabbie turned around and peered at them.
“You again?” said Joe. “You’ve got some explaining to do. Why was I sent down there alone while Alanna was stuck in this cab? Why did you let me muck it up so bad?”
“Why did I let you?” Morgan chuckled as he eased his cab out of the line and started to drive.
“You still think I’m God, don’t you?” Morgan glanced at them in the rear view mirror. “I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that word. It seems to make people so nervous. And besides, if I was God, Transition would have to be Heaven, wouldn’t it? And is that where you think you were?”
“Not exactly,” Alanna muttered. She’d never really pictured the afterlife as harps and angels but even so, it had to be more ethereal than bars and taxi cabs .
“Okay then, Morgan, what now? We granted her wish. Or at least part of it. Is she going to win the Lotto? She still has 2499 tickets in her purse.”
“It’s not quite that simple, Joe.”
Joe winced. “Somehow I didn’t think it was.”
Morgan turned the cab onto a busy street with strip malls on either side. “I thought this would be a good opportunity to let you see how Shelly got to be Shelly. There are some things you don’t yet understand.”
“What things?” Alanna asked and, as soon as the words hit the air the little taxi video screen in front of them—the kind you could watch the news on or pay for your cab fare—came to life with an image of Shelly superimposed over a grid of her life so far.
“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.
Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One) Page 4