The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (22 page)

This is
exactly
what she feared might happen. Somebody she knew finding out about the cancer. She believes that Jerry is required by law to keep today’s surgery confidential, but she’s not leaving anything to chance. She reminds him in her sternest voice, “I signed that Right to Privacy form.”

He works every day with drugged-up patients, so he doesn’t take offense. He replies with a good-hearted smile, “My lips are sealed. Scout’s honor.”

Despite his reassurance, and curious reference to
To Kill a Mockingbird
, Tess cannot still her panic. She can’t help but think that the nurse might call in an anonymous tip to the Ruby Falls Gazette during his coffee break, or maybe he and Mare will engage in pillow talk tonight and her secret will be out!

She jerks her head my way, gives me the cutthroat sign, and frantically points to Jerry who’s heading toward the room door.

Since our relationship is still new, at least from her perspective, Tess is unfamiliar with its boundaries. All IFs come with standard equipment like invisibility, telepathy, and high empathy, but it’s up to our friends to bestow any other special powers upon us. (Birdie’s Bee was a hell of a shoplifter, swimmer, and snappy dresser. She could also perform slight-of-hand magic, and with her telekinetic powers, she was able to move the snow drift that saved her friend’s life.) And while I
do
have special talents, it’s too soon in Tess’s and my relationship for them to be of much help. They build on her trust in me. But even if I was firing on all cylinders, I certainly wouldn’t do what she is so rabidly requesting. I would not do away with Jerry. (There are rules.)

The best I can offer her at the current time is Calpurnia-like reassurance. “Jerry’s not gonna tell the newspaper or his wife or anybody else about your cancer. Faith not fear,” I whisper in her ear. “How ’bout we get you dressed? Will’s almost here.”

Tess navigates the room floor like she’s crossing stepping stones set in raging water. Arms straight out and little choppy steps. Once she makes it safely to the bathroom, she changes into her street clothes, and grows calmer after she’s reunited with her purse. She fingers her babies’ blankets, brushes against her daddy’s Swiss Army knife, and withdraws her copy of the book that’s been patched together over the years with tape and admiration.

“Could you read to me until Will gets here?” She passes me
To Kill a Mockingbird
. “From the beginning?”

I don’t need to actually follow the words that Miss Harper Lee put down since we’ve got a lot of the book memorized, but I crack it open anyway for show. Louise didn’t read to her when she was younger and it was something she’d always envisioned as the motherly thing to do. Like baking a birthday cake from scratch or placing a cool hand on her fevered forehead or caring if her child lived or died.

I clear my throat and say, “‘When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.’” I’d made it through the Finch family history and had just begun the paragraph that would set the tone of the story. “‘Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town…,’” when Will steps into the room with a young woman dressed in a navy hospital-issued pantsuit.

He kisses Tess’s cheek and says, “Ready Freddy?”

The hospital girl insists that the patient get into the wheelchair before she’ll take her out of the room and to the side of her husband’s turquoise-and-blue ’57 Chevy that’s parked in the patient pick-up area, so Tess has no choice but to comply.

Will asks as he helps her into the car, “Does it hurt very much?”

Number 6.

“I’m fine,” Tess tells him.

Even if the pain was off-the-chart, she wouldn’t admit it. She sees her ability to endure discomfort as one of the only qualities she possesses that makes her feel superior to normal Will, and she’s not above lording it over him.

As they pull away from the hospital, she tells her chauffeur-husband in an uppity voice that is an almost exact replica of her mother’s, “Home, James. And be quick about it.”

It hasn’t escaped Tess’s attention that despite being in a hurry to return to work, he always is these days, Will has taken the route home from the hospital that he knows she likes the best. Carver Road ribbons over the thickest part of the Ridge River south of town. As they rumble over the covered bridge, she gazes out the Chevy’s window at the wide expanse of flowing water below. It’d been an unusually temperate winter, but jutting out from the right bank, a fringe of ice thoughtfully provided by Mother Nature is acting as a rest stop for a flock of geese.

Once they enter into the town proper, they’re welcomed by St. Lucy’s. High atop the hill that overlooks the town, the church’s copper spire is standing in bas relief against a sky of a deep blue. The day Will brought her home to Ruby Falls, Tess fell for the town almost as hard as she had for him, but she’s experiencing more than her normal appreciation. The downtown shops appear even more charming, the red-brick buildings and cobblestone streets reminiscent of a Dickens novel or Main Street Disneyland. As they pass Count Your Blessings, Will lays on the Chevy’s horn the way he always does.
Ah…oo…ga.
Lunch is busier than usual.
Milwaukee Magazine
had featured the diner in its yearly restaurant issue and world-weary customers have been showing up in droves. Through the plate-glass window, Tess gets a quick look at Connie Lushman greeting a young couple and two tow-headed kids. Even seeing the happy, well-configured, scarless woman who Will might love more than her doesn’t substantially alter her newfound zest for life. (We’ll see how long that lasts.)

As Will makes a left onto Chestnut Street, Tess’s heart swells with the love she feels for the home that’s included in the Chamber of Commerce’s walking tour. Some tourists might linger longer in front of the grander houses, but to her, the Blessings’ is the prettiest of them all.

In the front window of the colonial, Garbo, who’d been keeping watch for her mistress the way she always does, barks and scrambles off the back of the couch when she spots them turning into the driveway. After he pulls into the garage, Will rushes around the back of the finned car to help Tess out.

“What can I do?” he asks.

He thinks she’s hunched over because she’s in pain, when in reality, it’s a defensive move designed to protect her heart from the one who has damaged it the most—her mother. She’s passing the garage shelf where Louise is still waiting to be scattered. Tess is preparing herself to be verbally attacked, but oddly, not a peep comes out of the golden cube. Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard from Louise since the surgery. Had the anesthesia put her to sleep as well? Note to self: Send Dr. Gritzhammer a thank-you note immediately.

A sight for sore eyes, Garbo is waiting in the mud room with her Frisbee. The pain in Tess’s chest and throwing arm sharpens when she bends to stroke the top of her dog’s head. “Maybe later,” she tells her as she steps into the kitchen that she’d lovingly painted eggshell to better show off the children’s artwork on the refrigerator and walls. Her attention is drawn to a third-grade crayon drawing of Henry’s. Curlicue smoke escapes from the chimney and V birds fly across the sky. The Blessing stick family is standing on their front porch. It’s not the first time Tess thinks that the rendering Henry did of his sister back then is now almost accurate.

Will says, “I’ll make us tea. Can you get up the stairs without help?”

She grins at me and says, “No problem.”

She’s always been a hard-work-pays-off person, so she feels uncomfortable when I insist she slips into her
Champs-Élysées
nightie just a little past noon. After I help her into bed, she grimaces and edges the covers down to adjust a piece of surgical tape that’s pulling against her side. She’s in the midst of it when Will comes in holding the promised refreshments.

He jostles and almost drops the tray when he sees what Tess is fiddling with. “What’s
that
?”

She says, “My drain,” and then attempts to explain what she thought Jerry had told her.

Reaching for her teacup with her left hand because her right arm feels so heavy and numb reminds Tess of the long-ago days she and Birdie would pretend they were victims of attention-getting ailments of one kind or another. One of their most creative ideas came from a newsreel they’d seen on President Teddy Roosevelt. Those little Finley girls spent days letting their legs go as lifeless as Tess’s arm now feels. Once they had that crippled feeling down pat, they whiled away the good part of an afternoon attempting to fasten a jump rope around two old bike tires and a cast-off kitchen chair so they’d have their very own wheelchair. When that didn’t work out, they sat on the front stoop of the duplex looking wan and courageous with a wool blanket across their legs yelling, “Bully!” at passersby with the same enthusiasm they’d seen the ex-president deliver the line. Ahhh…the good old days when she and her sister had wished that Jonas Salk had gone into a different line of work.

Will tries, but fails to hide his discomfort at the sight of his wounded wife. “If you’re feeling okay I should get back to the diner.” He rakes his hands through his hair that Tess notices again looks less tarnished. It’s also fuller on the top, like he’s using a product to give it more body. “I left Connie alone.”

Tess is about to snippily say,
Well, God forbid Connie feels abandoned
, but the pained look on his face stops her. Is he concerned about the business? His hostess? Her? She’d ask, but he’d only give her his usual happy-go-lucky shrug.

“Mom?” Henry calls from downstairs.

“What’s he doing home so early?” Tess asks concerned. “You think he was suspended again?” Henry’d already been sent home twice this semester. Once for wearing a Santa Claus costume to school and the other for lipping off to a biology teacher who he’s had problems getting along with since he liberated the frogs that were about to be dissected.

Will says, “Lemme check.” He kisses her on the forehead. “If you need anything you know where to find me.”

On his way down the steps, Tess hears him ask their son why he’s home earlier than expected.

Henry doesn’t like to be interrogated. Peeved, he tells Will, “I told you this morning that the teachers are having some kind of meeting. Where’s Mom?”

“Resting. Take it easy on her. We just got back from the hospital.”

Henry’s size elevens take the remainder of the steps two at a time. He’s forgotten to put on his I-am-a-cool-teenage-boy face when he sits on the edge of the bed next to Tess. “Are you okay? How’s your shoulder?”

“What—” She’d momentarily forgotten the lie she’d come up with. “It’s a little sore, so you might need to help me out for a couple of days.” If Haddie, her lover of Lifetime medically themed movies was here, she’d have a bunch of questions, and maybe even ask to see beneath the bandage that she has artfully arranged the down comforter over. She’d eventually wheedle the truth out of her mother, but Henry? He may love to play bloody video games, but just like his dad, at the sight of the real thing he turns the color of bone.

He knits his brows together and asks, “Do you need something
now
?”

She spoils him, she knows that. He’d used to being cared for, not the other way around. If she keeps her requests simple, he’ll do just fine. Nothing complicated like,
Could you come closer so I can nuzzle your neck because I was positive that up to a few hours ago that I’d never see you again? I saved all your baby teeth in a jar that I keep in my dresser beneath the little blue knit hat you wore home from the hospital. You wanna see?

“A Coke would be great,” she tells him. “With ice.”

After Henry takes off, she partakes of the only tranquilizer she can swallow—a soap opera. She asks if
General Hospital
is all right with me, but I suggest my favorite,
Guiding Light
, and she politely clicks to Channel 6.

Neither one of us gets much viewing in before the phone trills an inch from her head. She struggles to prop herself up, lands on her drain, and cries out, “Hell-ow!”

“Mom?” Haddie asks. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, honey, I’m fine.” Tess gives thanks for once that her perceptive daughter is hundreds of miles away. “I was making the bed and kneeled on…,” she leans down and checks to make sure she didn’t do any damage to the drain, “the…ah…TV controller.” She doesn’t see the point in telling Haddie the shoulder surgery story, and she can count on Henry not to share it with her. He’s probably already forgotten about it by now because where is her Coke?

“How are
you
? Did you get your Valentine’s card?” she asks Haddie.

Tess had searched for just the right ones for her family for the better part of an hour. She had to be especially careful when it came to picking out Birdie’s because cards were such a big, big deal to her. They
had
to be Hallmark ones because her sister is obsessed with Hallmark. It all goes back to those
Hall of Fame
specials the company aired when the girls were children. They really got to little desperate-for-love Birdie. The sappy melodramas imprinted themselves on her so deeply that later in life she began to use Hallmark’s words of wisdom for guidance, the way Christians do the Bible, Jews the Torah, and Muslims the Koran. The walls of her Boca Raton apartment are papered with inspiring card innards like, “Today Is a Purrrfect Day!” and “Spread Your Wings!” There are also silver-lining ones: “The Tree of Life Has Many Limbs. If One Should Break…Go Out on Another!” Or “Today Was a Cloudy Day, but Tomorrow the Sun Is Sure to Shine!” and “Be a Ball and Bounce Back!”