The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (15 page)

She nabs the portable phone off the bedside table and punches in the diner’s number unsure if she wants to profess her undying love or ask him for a divorce.

“Count Your Blessings,” Will answers. “Be right with you.” His father had taught him that putting customers on hold was bad business in a small town, so as she waits, Tess can hear him tapping the register keys, wait staff shouting orders to the guys in the kitchen, kids playing the pinball machines in the game room, Duane Eddy wailing on the jukebox, and her husband telling a customer, “Please come again.”

“Why, Will Blessing, what a wonderful suggestion!” says sexpot Babs Hoover. She must’ve finished her do-gooder shift at St. Mary’s City Hospital and rushed right back to town in time to lunch with her friends who would lavish praise upon her once again for her humanitarian efforts.

When Will laughs at Bab’s dumb joke, Tess thinks that maybe she’s not kidding. It might not be Connie he’s sleeping with. Maybe Babs has gotten her claws into him.

“Sorry about the wait,” her hubby says when he picks up the phone. “How can I help you?”

“I’ve got cancer.”

Will’s gasp is loud and quick.
Finally
, Tess thinks with a small smile of satisfaction on the other end of the line. He’d been so sure this tumor talk had been nothing more than one of her erroneous assumptions, one of her Chicken Little moments.

He stutters out, “Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay…I’ll…I’ll come home and we can…ah…would a BLT hit your spot, or maybe…?”

Before he can ask her if she’d rather have a Blessing burger, a disappointed-yet-again Tess hangs up and dials the number on the card that Jill the nurse had given her.

A woman with a stuffy nose answers on the second ring, “Dr. Robert Whaley’s office.”

“Hi, this is Theresa….” Not everybody in Ruby Falls knows her, but many do. Is this woman required to keep these things to herself the way a doctor is supposed to? She’s not sure, so she gives the receptionist her maiden name. “I’d like to make an appointment for a consultation.”

The woman sniffles as she flips through an appointment book. “How about this Wednesday at eleven forty-five?”

Tess quickly confirms when she hears the ring of the jingle bells that hang on the backdoor of the house. She’d used them when she potty trained Garbo and had never taken them down because it made the family’s comings and goings seem jollier. It had to be Henry back from another grueling day of harassing Ruby Falls High faculty.

She hurries downstairs to find him already sprawled in front of the computer in the den concentrating on Internet Poker—Ubet. She says, “Hey,” and places her hand on his long back—the one he inherited from her uncle. He still let her rub it when he was in the mood. God, she adored every inch of this boy. The way he flaunted authority might be a red flag to another mother, but not to anxiety-ridden Tess who greatly admires his indomitable spirit. She used to be so much like him when she was a kid. She tip-toes her fingers through his curls. “How was school?”

He leans away from her hand. “Do we have any chips and dip?”

She’d normally take the brush-off in her stride, but it’s been a bad day and his rejection lands hard on top of the messy stack already piled up in her heart. She’s this close to yelling at him,
You better let me run my fingers through your hair before they’re buried along with the rest of me!

Her mother goads her on.
Smack him one. Let the ungrateful little snot know who’s boss
.

Tess has never and would never hit her children. Better to take her frustration out on Will. She calls out to him, “We’re in the den,” when she hears the bells jingle again.

“Hey, guys!” Her husband sets an order of fries down next to their little card sharp and waves a glassy-looking diner bag her way. “Grilled cheese and tomato?” When she shakes her head, Henry snatches the bag out of his dad’s hand and returns to his royal flush.

They can’t talk about the cancer in front of him, so Tess heads back upstairs, collapses onto her side of the bed, and waits for Will, who turns up a few minutes later to sit beside her. He massages his temples.

See what a headache you are?
Louise gloats.

“Are you sure it’s ah…?” Will asks again.

“I have an appointment with Rob Whaley on Thursday to discuss the surgery.”

“Great! Rob’s a good guy. Wonderful family. Steady customer.” When Tess doesn’t respond, he asks, the way you do when you offer to help someone and hope like heck that they don’t take you up on the offer, “So, ah, do you need me to drive you to his office?”

The appointment is right before the diner staff switches from breakfast to lunch, always a hectic time. “It’s scheduled right around the turn,” Tess says.

“No problem. I’m sure Connie would be happy to fill in.”

Oh, I just bet she would
, Louise says with a raunchy laugh.

“You’re supposed to work lunch on Friday. Do you think you’ll be up to it?” Will asks. “I could ask Sandy to cover for you.”

“Don’t,” Tess bosses the boss. “Friday is Richie day.”

Will smiles, places his hand atop of hers, pats it, and says, “Egbok. You’ll see.”

He’d offered her food…a ride…a corny platitude. He’s exhausted his repertoire.

When he stands and jiggles the ring of keys he keeps in his pocket, Tess is struck by how defined his biceps have become. And what happened to his pudgy belly? Maybe that’s what he’s been doing on Wednesday nights! He’s not bedding Connie, he’s pumping iron at Russell’s Gym! One of the women trainers must have long blond hair and wears Tabu!

Your fancy head shrinker ever mention a little concept called denial?

“Wish I could stay longer, but I’ve got a meeting with a new supplier in ten minutes back at the diner. Gonna be up when I get home tonight?” Will asks as he steps toward the bedroom door.

She takes a chance, and replies flirtatiously, “That depends.”

“Well, don’t force yourself to stay awake for me. You need your rest!” he says as he hustles out of the room.

Tess is picturing him now lying at the bottom of the staircase where he landed splay-legged after missing the top step in his dash to get away from her
.

(Sad and mad can be as hard to separate as Siamese twins, can’t they.)

She has just about had her fill of the male gender for one day, so she reaches for the phone to call Haddie for the third time today. Maybe her daughter wasn’t ignoring her calls, she could be studying in the library, or out on a date. There was a boy in the picture now. An artist psychically named Drew.

When her call is routed to voice mail, Tess becomes so desperate to speak to a woman she loves that she lies back, closes her eyes, and makes one of her pretend calls. Post-traumatic stress disorder is horrible, but it isn’t
all
bad. Thanks to her hyperactive imagination she can virtually hear her sister speaking back to her in her baby-talking way.

Birdie: Hello?

Tess: (Bursting into tears) I’ve got cancer and I need your help with Haddie and…and Will doesn’t love me anymore and Henry is being such a little jerk and…Louise is saying hateful things in my head and I’m gonna die and I don’t believe in God so I’m gonna go to Hell.

Birdie: (Bubbly) Guess who just visited Birdie?

Waiting tables at Count Your Blessings is the perfect job for my Tess. She gets a kick out of the staff, fills her customers’ hungry bellies, amuses all with her scintillating brand of humor, and when the shift ends, everyone returns to their respective lives, no one the wiser.

For patrons around her age, the diner is a tonic for the ills of modern life. The younger set appreciates the place the same way they do the history museum. The jukebox holds forty-fives like Chubby Checker’s
The Twist
and the Everly Brothers
Wake Up Little Susie
. Above the soda fountain and running the length of the walls are eight-by-ten glossy pictures of ’50s movies like
The Blob
and
From Here to Eternity
that Will was given by his friend, Stan Majerus, who owns the Rivoli Movie House next door.

No matter how much Tess wishes it weren’t true, she knows that their customers would be yanked straight out of those happy days if they knew that a malignant growth was flourishing inside the middle-aged, ponytailed waitress dressed in the old-fashioned white uniform with the wide black belt. She certainly is when she waits on cancer-patient Marilyn “Mare” Hanson, who used to run a little plump, but now reminds Tess of the No. 2 pencil she’ll use to jot down her order. Mare also used to be quite obnoxious, but the illness knocked the snot right outta her.

(The folks that are attracted to Tess that I mentioned earlier on? I forgot to point out that a lot of them are also physically ill. She lures them like Lourdes.)

On this particular afternoon Mare, a regular, is seated at table four. She’s staring out the front window of the diner with a wistful smile watching the Winter Festival visitors bustle by. The event is one of Ruby Falls’ most appealing. (Doesn’t take much to entertain folks who’ve been cooped up and staring at four walls most of the winter.) The snowman-building contest, bed races held on the river, and ice sculptures that line the sidewalks in front of shops offering sales are a big draw, and since Count Your Blessings is iconic, it’d been slammed as well.

Mare’s chapped hands are cupped and lying on the red Formica table like she’s waiting for something to be dropped into them.
Hope
, Tess thinks. When she delivered Will’s shirts to Melton’s Dry Cleaners on Tuesday, Jan told her that employee, Mare, didn’t seem to be bouncing back the way she did the other times she went through chemo. “She’s got three kids,” Jan choked out before she slipped through the curtain into the backroom.

Tess approaches the table and says, “Hey, Mare, what can I get you today?” She is aware that it’s a ridiculous question to ask in a myriad of ways. She’ll order the same thing she always does, but so much of her life now is in the hands of others that my friend feels compelled to allow her choices.

“The usual?” Mare asks. “When you get the chance? No hurry.”

Tess says, “Comin’ right up,” plucks a straw out of her apron, and sets it down next to one of her customer’s beseeching hands.

On her way into the kitchen to prepare the double-thick chocolate malt that will hopefully add more meat to Mare’s bones, Tess slips on a spill and grabs onto the hairless arm of Otto von Schmidt to save herself from a nasty fall.

The dishwasher’s reaction to her grab is to yell, “Whoa, Nelly!” way, way too loudly because he’s wearing sound-reducing headphones. Otto, who uses Nair on his hands and arms because he thinks it makes them faster in water, is wiry and of medium height. Seems silly to describe his hair as dishwater blond, but it is, and it stands on end like he was struck by lightning on the way to work, so he always comes off quite energetic. He fixes his one hazel eye on Tess—his other is made of glass, the result of a pencil incident that occurred when he was a child that no one has ever gotten to the bottom of—and says, “Steady there, Bess.”

She gave up correcting him years ago.

Despite it being the toughest position in the diner to keep filled, Will might have fired him by now if Tess hadn’t pled his case. Her husband likes things to run smoothly and Otto von Schmidt is a mile of bad road, emotionally speaking. When he isn’t wearing his usual heavy duty headgear, a shower cap covered in aluminum foil is set atop his head in order to block satellite communications from the CIA and the dreaded Planet Argon. And if you should strike up a conversation with him be prepared to set aside some time. Otto will go on and on, repeating every once in a while, “You catch my drift?”

Tess’s heart goes out to the fragile and paranoid dishwasher because he reminds her at times of Birdie, but even she had to admit that he’d gone too far when he began “investigating” one of the young women who worked in the vintage clothing store across the street from the diner. Otto bought high-powered binoculars and kept track of the girl’s every move in a black composition notebook. When just watching her wasn’t enough, he purchased a device called The Ear so he could listen in on her private conversations. He also wrote a stack of letters that he hand delivered to the owner of What’s Old Is New Again that went something like this:

Deer Missus of Old Close Store. sailsgirl

Debbie is hot to trot. give me her number pronto!!!!!!!!!!

xxx OOOtto xoxo

The mash notes stopped shortly after the owner of the store complained to Will, who had a serious discussion with his employee about appropriate behavior. Since Otto always took “The Big Boss Man’s” words to heart, he forgot about the local girl and went international. He ordered himself a Russian mail-order bride. He keeps a picture of the beautiful Elena above his workspace. The edges of the photo are curling from the steam, and it’s been kissed so many times that it’s become worn in the mouth area. His wife from Minsk doesn’t speak or understand much English, so when Otto says, “Did you hear that? That growling?” she nods and asks, “You vant I blow on your job?” and seems as happy with her big strong American as he is with her.

Tess tells Otto, “Thanks for the hand,” wipes off the bottom of her shoe with a bar towel, and fetches the milk for Mare’s malted out of the drinks cooler.

Connie Bushman leans into the kitchen to let Tess know, “Go ahead and double that malted order. Holly and Richie just rolled in…I mean….”

Throughout the shift, my friend has been studying the hostess. Did Connie check to see if Will was watching when she bent over to give crayons and a coloring page to the little girl at the soda fountain? Was she showing him her cushy bottom or what a great mom she’ll be once Tess steps out of the family picture? She picked a thread off of Will’s shirt—a meaningless gesture of coworkers or the casual touch of intimates?

I pick door number two
, her mother says.

Tess shouts back to the hostess, “Got it.
Muchas gracias
.”

Juan Castillo, who is hunkered over the deep fryer, had been teaching her some kitchen Spanish, so he turns toward her with a smile.