The Resurrection of Tess Blessing (8 page)

The seasoned nurse muttered, “The blues,” and showed Tess how to fasten Haddie onto her nipple, which is where she kept her until she became so chubby that no one would dare question the fact that she’d been taking care of her properly, not even her.

Allowing her to nurse too often and for too long, was that how I screwed up? Tess asks herself as she walks her daughter’s plate to the kitchen sink. (She believes that her sister’s eating disorder was the result of Louise’s bad mothering, and if A=B and B=C, then she has failed as well, but her logic couldn’t be more off. All sorts a things figure into a child’s makeup. Bad mothering plays a part, but so do brain chemicals and friends and television shows and destiny and wiring and even past lives. A soul is a quilt stitched of many patches.) As she turns on the hot tap water to rinse the dinner dishes, she wishes again that Birdie, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, would return her e-mails. Tess misses her so much, and her strangely wise little sister might even be able to help undo the damage she believes she’s done to Haddie.

The diner is open seven days a week, so Will is leaving to attend to business. “Cheerio,” he says as he breezes past Tess on his way to the mud room. He leaves an unfamiliar aroma in his wake. It isn’t his usual English Leather, but some other high-school cologne. It reminds her of beer cans, and making out in the backseat of muscle cars to an eight-track tape of
Rubber Soul
. Was it Jade East? Had his
amour
Connie Lushman given it to him? Is that the scent Will wore when they were going steady?

The thought of losing him suddenly strikes fear in Tess’s heart, so when her husband calls out from the backdoor, “Later,” she shouts out a desperate, “I love you!” and he answers breezily, “Yeah, you too.”

When Haddie grabs the Volvo keys off the rack above the desk a few minutes later and disappears on Will’s heels, Tess doesn’t ask where she’s going. She’s too afraid that she’ll tell her that it’s anywhere she isn’t.

Henry hops up on the kitchen counter next to the sink and asks, “How about stakin’ me ten bucks? The guys are getting together tonight to play Texas Hold ’Em.” His goal in life is to become a professional poker player like Phil Ivey or Wisconsin’s own, Phil Hellmuth. (He’s planning on legally changing his first name to the obvious at a later date to increase his odds.)

Tess dries her hands on the checkered dish towel, takes her wallet out of her black lucky purse, and slips a twenty into the back pocket of Henry’s jeans. Figuring he owes her one, she steals a hug after he hops down from the counter. She tells him, “Have fun.” He’ll receive his learner’s permit next month, but tonight he’ll ride his ten-speed bike to his big-time, high-stakes poker tournament. “Wear your helmet.”

Once she finishes tidying up the kitchen, she switches the light off above the stove, and heads toward the mud room. Seems like the house, and the dog, are the only ones who want to talk to her anymore. The radiators clank. The grandfather clock in the front hallway ticks. A creak here, a longer creak there. Garbo’s nails click on the wide-plank wood floor as she follows Tess out to the garage where she retrieves the cancer pamphlets that Ginger had passed across her desk that afternoon. She’d hidden them under the car’s floor mat for safekeeping.

Her stomach jackknifes on her way back into the house and she dashes to the powder room off the kitchen. Kneeling in front of the toilet, she thinks of her daughter and how much time she spends worshipping the bowl. Her already-fragile girl wouldn’t be able to handle the thought that her mother could be dying. Same goes for Henry. Beneath his crusty boy exterior, he’s mushy. So like she promised herself earlier, she’ll not tell either of the children about the cancer.

Is that a crown of thorns appearing on your head, Mother Theresa?

After the rest of her dinner comes up in three more heartfelt heaves, Tess collapses against the cool white tile wall and stretches her legs out to make room for Garbo’s warm, bicycle seat head. She shows her golden retriever the pictures in the brochure and says, “Try not to worry, but some doctor is gonna stick a needle into me in a few days and take something out that he’ll use to predict my future, which I’m sorry to inform you, dear girl, isn’t looking too rosy.”

Garbo licks her mistress’s salty cheek and backs out of the powder room. She’ll return with her Frisbee. It’s their usual after-dinner routine.

Tess rinses out her mouth, opens the door off the den that leads to the expansive deck out back, and flips on the flood lights. She looks past her recently created flock of snow angels and flings the Frisbee with all she’s got. When a panting Garbo returns, my friend crouches down, picks up the toy, and says with appreciative pats, “Oh, my goodness, that’s a magnificent duck you’ve retrieved!” It’s a fill-in-the-blank running joke between the two of them that’s based on the holiday calendar. “I’ll clean it and we’ll cook it up for Easter dinner!”

Another wave of nausea hits when Tess realizes that she may not be joining the family around the antique dining room table to enjoy Will’s honey-baked holiday ham and sweet-potato casserole. The spring robins building nests in Henry’s birdhouse, the yellow daffodils that always bring Haddie to mind, and the unfurling lilac bushes alongside her garden that are a tribute to her beloved Gammy might be lost to her too.

Will I be around to plant my garden on Mother’s Day the way I always do?” she wonders as she rushes back to the powder room. Or will I be the one getting planted?

Downtown Milwaukee whizzing past the car window reminds art-appreciating Tess of a sporty Leroy Neiman painting.

Will hadn’t gotten around to doing the work he needed to do on the used Taurus they’d bought Haddie for graduation, so instead of him driving her back to school as originally planned, her parents dropped her at the airport to catch the flight back to Savannah. She’d given her dad a clenching goodbye, but she felt like a slab of cement between her mother’s arms.

Tess’s breath makes a frosty patch on the passenger window of her husband’s perfectly restored turquoise-and-white ’57 Chevy on their trip home from Billy Mitchell Field. She uses her fingernail to create a heart and draws an X through it.

She still hadn’t told him yet about the suspicious mammogram. She’d planned to last night. She’d slipped into the lacy nightie with the slits in all the right places hoping that after Will returned home from the diner, they would make passionate love. Afterwards, with her head resting on his chest, would’ve been the perfect time to deliver the news. But as she listened to him stripping in their dark bedroom, she smelled the usual French fry oil and his father’s famous meat loaf, but she also got a whiff of something womanly that didn’t belong on her man—Connie Lushman’s Tabu, so she rolled up in a ball and pretended to be asleep.

When Will leans forward to crank the car radio up, the sun catches his tarnished hair that seems darker around his temples. Is he trying to spruce himself up for Connie? Tess knows she should confront him instead of torturing herself like this. She’s thought about doing so many times over the past month. She even cruised by the diner this past Wednesday night to see if the Chevy was in the lot, or parked in front of Connie’s house, but after years of managing her PTSD, if there’s anything she knows it’s her limits. She couldn’t discover for sure that on top of dying, she was being cheated on. She might lose control and kill one of them. Probably Will.

When her husband starts singing along to the Stones, “You can’t always get what you waaant,” I hoped Tess would smile, but she doesn’t notice Mick’s plaintive wailing, she’s too busy obsessing over whether or not she should share the results of the mammogram with Will at all. He’s been so distracted lately, cold, but it’d be irresponsible not to give him some warning if she’s about to die. How fast does this disease move? Does she have weeks? Months? He doesn’t know where she keeps the kids’ birth certificates and their school reports and….

She makes a kitten in distress sound.

Connie doesn’t make baby-animal noises. Everyone in town thinks your husband missed the boat when he dumped her for you
, mean Louise points out.

“What’s the big life-threatening situation today?” her hubby asks in response to her mewling.

He’s expecting her to tell him something like…I saw a mouse this afternoon in the attic, but it could’ve been a small rat, and I heard on the news about a case of bubonic plague in India and…and it could’ve snuck off one of the boats that dock in Milwaukee and then hitched a ride to Ruby Falls in a…a…truck delivering vegetables to the diner and then…attracted by all the chrome on the Chevy—they love shiny things—it climbed into the frame and after you parked in the garage it…it hopped out and—
Oh, my God!
We gotta get home and call the exterminator before it’s too late!

“This time it really
is
a life-threatening situation,” Tess says, a tad angrily. She lets her hand hover above her right breast like Will might need a visual aid to remember where it’s located. “You know the yearly mammogram I had a few days ago?”

He checks the fur-lined rearview mirror and flicks on his turn signal. “Uh-huh.”

“Well…I…I probably have cancer.”

“No, you don’t,” he says as he changes lanes.

Now, this might seem like a steely brush-off, cruel even, but Will no longer puts much stock in her fears. He doesn’t feel compelled to rush to her side and rescue his damsel in emotional distress any longer. While Tess has remained essentially the same woman he married due to her emotional challenges, he’s changed. Not lately, but he can
still
be compassionate, just not like he used to be in the good old days. He’s no longer the hand-holding man who had reassured her countless times over the years, “I’m pretty sure the teller with the cold at the bank didn’t lick your deposit slip.” Or, “I’m pretty sure that the cook at Dunkin’ Donuts didn’t put rat poison into your jelly-filled to get back at his wife who looks a lot like you.”

When Tess would choke out, “Only
pretty
sure?”

“Real sure,” Will would say with a nuzzle of her scared, sweaty neck that he loved the smell of. “Like chicken soup on the simmer,” he’d told her.

These days, Tess thinks he sees her more like a middle-aged chick running through the streets screaming, “
Run for your lives! The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
”

And she really doesn’t blame him for feeling that way. She
has
to put up with herself, but why should he? She can even understand why he’d go looking for nookie elsewhere. She’s already damaged goods. Emotionally, spiritually, and now, probably physically. Why
would
Will want her when he could have sane and fully-breasted choir-leader Connie “Luscious” Lushman?

“And you don’t have malaria or AIDS either,” Will adds on after a long silence.

At the bottom of the freeway exit, he makes the turn that’ll take them down the roller-coaster country road that’ll deposit them back in Ruby Falls. “This is just another one of your erroneous assumptions.” He’d come up with many polite terms for her fears over the years, “erroneous assumptions” was the newest.

Tess regrets telling him about the mammogram now, and reluctantly adds on, “I’ve got a biopsy scheduled tomorrow at St. Mary’s City to confirm it.”

The other reason she’s been dragging her feet is she knows he’s not going to take the news well. Given his current coolness toward her, she doesn’t think he’ll worry all that much if she’s got cancer. But even if they
were
getting along, he’s much too, “Keep your sunny side up, everything’s going to be okay!” But, like most men, he’s a wuss when it comes to illness. This disease would be particularly hard for him to deal with; his father died of bone cancer when Will was fourteen. The man has been enshrined in his son’s memory, but Cyrus Blessing was anything but a saint. She’s been gone many years now, but during the time that Tess tended to Mother Ruth after her stroke, the same way her gammy had when she sensed her number was up, Will’s mom revealed long-held family secrets. With sad, loose lips, she told Tess one afternoon in the bedroom with the rose wallpaper how her husband had taken a fancy to one of the diner’s waitresses in 1952. “Her name was Rochelle. Shelly, they called her. Willie doesn’t remember, he was in kindergarten at the time, but Cy left us to be with her. He came back a few months later with his tail between his legs, but things were never the same between us after that. Pay attention to those diner girls, honey. They can sneak up on you.”

Tess looks sideways at Will and wonders if unfaithfulness is coursing through his blood. Maybe he can’t help but stray, it’s in his DNA. He left his former fiancée for her, didn’t he?

His gap-toothed grin casts a spell on my friend’s body the evening he came roaring up in that old Triumph to the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, and it can still make her inner thighs tingle. She’s often thought about how Connie Lushman must rue the day she’d sent him for tango lessons because she’d wanted their spotlight wedding dance to be memorable.

At twenty-three, Will Blessing was four years older than Tess, but he was far less world-weary than she for his small-town childhood had been a mostly smooth sail. With his decided slant toward optimism, she’d found him completely irresistible and more-than-a-little goofy. He wooed her with mall-store jewelry and six packs of Coke in the glass bottles because anybody who knows anything about cola knows they are the
crème de la crème
. He watched ’40s musicals with her in the little efficiency apartment above the bike store, and when he proposed to her only weeks after they’d met, he was wearing a zipped-up sweatshirt with the hood tied too tight beneath his chin. He loved his mother and admired his long-dead father. He blushed when Tess cursed. “Bringing them back to their former glory,” is how he described his passion for restoring old cars. She loved that. It made her feel sure that he wouldn’t dump her for a newer model when she went rusty.

Had she been wrong about him? Made an “erroneous assumption”?