The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (29 page)

“Tell me more about the Tamoxifen.” She’d read about the drug in the plethora of printed material she’d been given over the past months, but she was still unsure if she needed to take it.

“It’s a pill form of chemotherapy,” Whaley says. “You have an estrogen-receptive tumor, so taking the Tamoxifen will be like placing an embargo on an evil dictator.”

She wonders how many times he’s used that line on other women. “I’m not political.”

“You must take the Tamoxifen.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No!” Scarred and scared, quibbling with this dishy guy over a drug she’s frightened to take, shoves her over the edge and into the Valley of Tears.

“Tess,” Whaley says as he sets a box of Kleenex down next to her. “You can do this. You’re strong.”

Before she can stop herself, she shouts, “No, I’m not!” Too ashamed, caring too deeply that people would think she was as repulsive as her mother made her feel if she let them see her symptoms, she’s about to yell something that she’s never admitted to anyone other than mental health professionals and Will. The truth. “I’ve got PTSD and OCD and…and agoraphobia and I can’t swallow pills and…and I can’t go to Paris and I’m afraid of pig snot and—goddamn it all!”

Now you’ve done it.

Had she?

Tess is stunned to find that instead of wanting to curl up in a humiliated ball the way she thought she would if someone found out that she colored outside the lines, she doesn’t seem to give a rat’s ass what Rob Whaley thinks. It hits her then that what I’d told her in the elevator was the truth. Somewhere along this journey, without realizing it, she must’ve already told herself, “Fuck it,” because she doesn’t feel beaten down, small, and defeated. She feels like…like a heavyweight contender ready to take on all comers!

In response to her outburst, the doc places his hand on her forearm and says, “I don’t mean to overstep my bounds, I’m a surgeon not a psychiatrist.” He gives her a look dripping with concern. “But it sounds like you might have some underlying emotional issues that need to be addressed.”

When she responds to his observation by breaking into fairly maniacal laughter, Whaley tries to make it look like he isn’t hurrying through the exam room door—no sudden moves around crazy people—to fetch a hypodermic full of valium.

Tess stops laughing long enough to holler after the doctor, “Hey, Rob?”

“Yes?” comes warily out of the hallway.

“Your barn door’s open.”

Lou Gehrig’s disease laid claim to the rest of Tess’s favorite diner customer, Richie Mattigan, last week. She’d had his joke and his table ready on his usual day, but his wife had shown up alone on Friday to break the news. In the privacy of the party room, Holly had blubbered, “If you could tell one of your jokes at his service, you know how he loves…I mean…lov
ed
them.” Tess rubbed her back, told her she’d be honored, and placed an order for two hot fudge sundaes with extra whipped cream that they raised in a toast, “To Richie.”

A few days later, Tess was gazing down at the standing-room-only crowd at St. Lucy’s who’d come to remember the life of this extraordinary man.

After a few other friends and family members spoke about Richie’s many attributes and contributions, ancient Father Jessop introduced Tess to the congregation. She stood tall behind the lectern, pointed first at Richie’s wife and his two beautiful children in the first pew, upwards, and then to her heart. The joke she’d prepared was a spin on a treasured anecdote Richie had shared with her before he’d become too ill to speak.

She clears her throat and says, “During one of his usual Sunday school classes a while back, Richie quizzed his little students on how one went about getting into Heaven. He asked them, ‘If I gave a lot of my time and money to St. Lucy’s would that do the trick?’”

“‘NO!’ the children shouted back.”

“‘Well…what if I helped paint the church and mowed the lawn and plowed out the parking lot in winter, would that get me into Heaven?’ he wondered.”

“Once more the group of kids answered with a loud and clear, ‘NO!’”

“Richie said, ‘How about if I was super-duper nice and smart and worked hard at being a great dad and husband and coached Little League and donated turkeys on Thanksgiving to people less fortunate and never once complained when I got sick with a horrible disease, would that be enough to get me into Heaven?’”

“Once again, his Sunday school pupils hollered together, ‘NO!’”

“‘Huh,’ Richie said as he scratched his head and looked perplexed at their sweet upturned faces. ‘Then…how in the heck
would
I get into Heaven?’”

“One of the little boys sitting in the back of the room jumped up and shouted, “‘You gotta be dead, Mr. Mattigan!’”

Since the congregation was more familiar with sermons than stand-up, no one knew quite how to react to the punch line. It wasn’t until Richie’s wife and kids began to laugh that the rest of the mourners joined in.

Tess would later tell Will that she was certain that amongst the giggles and guffaws that’d filled the church that afternoon, she’d heard Richie’s unmistakably soulful laugh. She’d know it anywhere.

A deeply depressed Tess and I are making the first of many drives we’ll be taking during the following months to St. Joe’s Hospital. Will offered to come along, but she’d shot him down. Losing Richie has heightened her worries about losing her own husband. Not to illness, but to Connie Lushman.

I tell her as we exit the I-43 and turn up North Avenue, “You’re in a rut. You need to go someplace other than funerals, the grocery store, the diner, Henry’s basketball games, the old folks’ home, and doctors’ offices.”

“Like where?” she says flatly.

“You could get your hair done.” Her mass of red curls has grown long enough to reach her shoulder blades. “It’s lookin’ confused.”

Sitting in the Peaches and Cream salon, listening to stylist Suzanne going on about Wonder Bras, steamy television shows, or saying,
Hey, did you hear that Mrs. Johnson got so ticked off at incoming PTA president Mrs. Hoskins that she toilet-papered her house?
seems as pointless as everything else does when Tess gets down like this.

And this morning’s trip isn’t helping her mood any. She’s well aware that spending time in the old neighborhood might ignite painful flashbacks and panic on top of everything else, so we are proceeding westward under a yellow flag.

When we are stopped by the light on 48th Street, the corner home of Dalinsky’s Drugstore, I point out the window and say to her perkily, “How about a little pleasure before business?”

She’s hoping they still serve their classic root beer floats as she pulls to the curb. I usher her through the door and over to the red Formica lunch counter that’s so much like the one at Count Your Blessings, they could be twins. While we wait for Tess’s brown cow, she checks her memory against the improvements the store has made over the decades. The cosmetic counter is still where it was, so is the magazine rack near the front door. She notices the banner of a
True Detective
, and below it a row of
Playboy
s that remind her of how she’d once dreamed of her chest growing as huge as Miss August 1962. She wonders if checking out those dirty magazines when she was a kid was why she got breast cancer. Is she paying for her sins?

“Here ya go,” the young waitress says as she sets the frosty mug down.

As my friend slurps, I point out, “I know ya don’t give a hoot about anything right now, but you might want to have a copy of that detecting magazine at the ready. When you feel better and decide to follow Will, you’ll want to be prepared.” She won’t respond because she can’t imagine ever feeling lighter of heart again, or caring about Will, their marriage, or anything else. Except for her children. There is no dark force within or without that could keep her from loving and protecting them.

She pays the check at the same register Birdie had once seen the postcard of the burly, redheaded fellow she thought was their daddy in Boca Raton. She gets impulsive when she gets in this mood, so as we pass the rack, Tess slips a copy of
True Detective
inside her coat.

I’m hoping her mood will take an uptick after she completes her mission as we head toward our next intended stop that’s about a half mile west of the drugstore.

Will had shown her Mrs. Alvina “Ma” Malishewski’s obituary and the accompanying story in the
Milwaukee Journal
, so she knew the Allen Ludden-loving candy lady had died years ago of diabetes, and that her daughter Katrina a.k.a. “New Ma,” was doing her best to follow in her mother’s footsteps.

The bell still tinkles on the front door of the sweet shop, and it still smells of sauerkraut, and the bins are overflowing with the identical sweets that Birdie and she had adored as kids. When the woman comes scuffling out of the back room, Tess gasps at how much she resembles Old Ma. My friend tells her she was sorry to hear about her mother, and they reminisce for a bit before she asks for the four sets of red wax lips for her sister and a Holloway sucker for herself. She runs her hand down the black iron railing next to the front steps on her way back to the car and it feels the same.

It strikes her on the quick drive to the hospital how things may get an overhaul, but at the heart of the matter…do they really change? Do people? How much different was she really from the mixed-up sad girl who sat on the steps of Ma’s forty years ago hoping to learn more about love and life?

Since she’d dissociated during their get-together last week, Tess is having a hard time recalling what her radiation oncologist, Dr. Sherman, had told her to expect at this morning’s mapping appointment. Something about receiving tattoos and that the thirty-six treatments would be painless. For sure he said, “You’re going to get a little tired.”

She could handle just a little tired, but barely. The three surgeries had taken a toll not only on her mind, but her forty-nine-year-old body. She wanted to take Garbo for a walk down Chestnut St. yesterday, but they only got as far as the Keller’s house before she had succumbed to spaghetti legs and shortness of breath. (Some of those symptoms might not have been caused by her physical state. Strolling down the block always reminded her of how she and Will would tango down to the tree that he’d carved their initials in, and the passionate lovemaking that followed.)

“Theresa…Tess Blessing,” she tells the itty-bitty woman at the cancer center’s check-in desk. “I have an appointment to get my mapping done.”

“Welcome,” the gal says in a dolly voice. “I’m Marty. Dr. Whaley’s office forwarded your insurance information, so you can take a seat. Someone will be with you soon.”

Two chairs down from us in the fluorescent-lit waiting area there’s an older, ski-pole thin, bald, black woman. Her grandbaby, who she may never see grow up, is at her feet making
vroom, vroom
sounds with a red Matchbox car.

Tess thinks of Henry and turns her head away to take in the rest of the room. Unattractive nature prints similar to the ones that dot the walls of St. Mary’s North hang on the walls. The four vinyl couches are muddy brown and worn on the arms, and the room reeks of nervous sweat, perfumes, and…salami?

A medium-sized man with lovely white hair worn in a pompadour appears at the edge of the waiting room. “Theresa Blessing?” When she asks him to call her by her nickname, he replies in a voice that makes her think of the Shhhh sign at the library. “I’m Irwin.” The smile he shares is welcoming and very white. His eyes are Paul Newman blue and Tess wonders if he’s wearing contacts. “I’ll be your radiation tech for the next seven weeks.” He slips a lotion-softened hand around her elbow and guides her down a hall to the women’s locker room because men get breast cancer too. “After you change, wait here.” He gestures to six hard tan chairs lined up across from a wall TV where a cocoa-colored woman is seated. When he says, “Harriet,” the woman shuffles after him in worn, yellow bedroom slippers.

Mostly, Tess selected this hospital because she’s positive she won’t bump into someone she knows from Ruby Falls who’d blow her cover. But that’s not the only reason. The color of the residents of this part of town played a huge part in her decision. Like I mentioned earlier on, my friend has always felt more comfortable with people of a darker hue. If they should hail from the South, they get bonus points. (Which came first? Her passion for
To Kill a Mockingbird
or the passion she brought to the story? Her subconscious also remembers more than she realizes about the first encounter we’d had when she and Birdie were driven furiously to the Core by Louise during one of her drop-off punishments. My rolled sugar cookies are hard to forget.)

I say with a grin when she exits the locker room gowned and robed, “I take it that you’ve noticed that you’re the only white girl in the joint besides tiny Marty, right?”

She cracks a smile—the first of the day—as she tugs her spine-broke copy of Miss Harper Lee’s book out of her lucky purse. She’s using her new To-Do List both as a bookmark and inspiration to press on, but she doesn’t stop to obsess over it the way she normally would. She dives into one of her favorite scenes in her favorite story to ground herself.

Four cars of fired up men have arrived at the Maycomb jailhouse carrying a rope they’re fixin’ to drop over the neck of the man wrongly accused of raping Mayella Violet Ewell. Atticus Finch has come to guard his client Tom Robinson. In answer to the rumblings around town, he’s propped himself up in a chair outside the jailhouse door beneath a dark sky. Unbeknownst to Mr. Finch, his children, Jem and Scout, and their friend Dill have followed him into town. They’re witnessing the drama that’s about to unfold from the shadows the jail casts.

As told by Scout: “They were sullen-looking, sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours. I sought once more for a familiar face, and in the center of the semi-circle I found one. Hey, Mr. Cunningham.”

Courtesy of her PTSD, she isn’t just reading the story, she’s
in
the story. Breathing the hot honeysuckle perfumed Alabama night air, the leftover dust and sweat on the children, the car fumes, and the rancid bloodlust covering the men who are there to do the devil’s work. Atticus’s integrity is touchable. Scout’s voice…inches away.