The Resurrection of Tess Blessing

  Tess is famished and orders them both today’s Blue-Plate Special—a Blessing Burger, fries, and a chocolate phosphate. She thought her svelte sister would only pick at the food, but her appetite must’ve been whetted by the nostalgia and excitement over tonight’s adventure, because she wolfs down her burger. She dips the last of her crispy fries into the ketchup, then tilts her head to the left when she hears, “Welcome to Count Your Blessings. How many are in your party?”

  Birdie whispers across the table, “Is that her?”

  Since Will had seated them, Tess’d thought that Connie Lushman must’ve taken the day off to rest up for her tryst with him tonight, but she must’ve been on a break. My friend finishes off the remainders of her phosphate and says, “The one and only.”

  “Holy shit. No wonder you’re freaking out. She’s hot.” When Tess kitten mewls, Birdie removes her foot from her mouth and adds on, “I mean, ya know, only if you like alabaster skin, naturally blond hair, and geeze, I think her bellows are real.”

  Tess can’t fault her for thinking the same thing she is. She tosses the napkin onto her plate and says, “If you’re done….” They have to get a move on, they have a timetable to stick to. “Let’s get the spy equipment from Otto.”

  Will gives Tess a kiss on the cheek and winks at Birdie when they approach the cash register. “Lunch good?” he asks.

  Birdie says bubbly, “Best I’ve had in years,” because she’s already figured out that there is no better way to compliment her brother-in-law than by lavishing praise upon his vittles.

  Will grins at the kudo, then pulls Tess aside and says, “Sorry, but I won’t be home for supper after all. I forgot that I’ve got to empty out the cooler and move everything into the other ones during the break.” Lester Holt, the county health inspector, had paid a surprise visit during Monday’s dinner shift. The temperature had dropped another degree in the meat cooler and Lester insisted that Will get mechanic, Frank Morton, to come in and replace the motor immediately rather than Sunday night as planned.

  Just to make sure what she told Birdie was true, she asks Will, “But you’re still going to call it quits around nine?”

  “Hope so,” he says. “I’ll let the staff go then, but I’ve got to stick around until Frank is finished working on the motor. You know how pokey he can be.”

  She puts on her Brownie smile and says, “I’ll see you when I see you.” Which will be sooner than you think, you big fat liar. “I’m gonna give Birdie the tour.”

  Even more determined now to expose Will’s dallying, she returns to the cash register, picks up her sister’s hand, and tugs her into the kitchen.

  “Behind…behind…behind,” she says as she steers through the chaos of the busy shift. On their way to the sink, she introduces Birdie to Juan and his cousins, who are overwhelmed in front of the deep fryers, and then to waitresses, Sandy, Nancy, and Alison, who are darting about filling and placing orders. After she calls out loudly to the dishwasher and he doesn’t respond, she taps Otto on his shoulder to get his attention.

  He turns, dries his hands off on his apron, removes his aluminum-foil-wrapped headwear, and says, “Oh. Hey, Bess, and….” He focuses intently on Birdie, with his good eye anyway. The one he lost to the pencil accident stays as still as a Buckingham Palace guard. “Who’s your friend?”

  After she introduces her sister, lovelorn Otto clicks his heels together, bends at the waist, lifts Birdie’s hand to his lips, and says, “Enchanté.”

  “Oh, boy,” Tess mutters because she can see where this is going. She steps between them, and asks Otto, “Did you bring the night-vision binoculars and The Ear like I asked you to?”

  Still giving Birdie the goo-goo eye, he says, “They’re in my locker.”

  “Great. What’s the combination?” Tess asks him.

  “That’s on a need-to-know basis.”

  She knows trying to convince him to give up the combination won’t work. He’s too paranoid. “Okay,” she says as she glances over her shoulder at Will to make sure he’s still busy at the cash register. “We’ll come with you to the locker room to get it.”

  “Negative.” Otto is about to put his headphones back on and resume his duties. “The Big Boss Man wouldn’t like it if I abandoned my station.”

  She thinks fast. “You saw me talking to him at the cash register a few minutes ago, didn’t you?” Otto nods. He doesn’t miss much. “I was asking him if it was okay if you left the sink for a few minutes and he said sure, but we have to be quick about, so vamanos!”

  With Tess in the lead, the three of them hurry out of the kitchen’s side door and down the long hall that leads to the room in the back of the building where the staff can store their personal belongings during their shifts, grab a smoke, or just get off their feet for a few minutes.

  After Otto checks to make sure the room is empty, he moves ninja-like to the bank of utilitarian gray lockers that line one of the walls. Tess tries to peek, but he uses his taut, muscular body—he does the Royal Canadian Air Force exercises every morning—to shield the combination from her.

  To the best of her knowledge, no one else on the staff decorates their lockers, but Otto has taped on the inside door an eight-by-ten glossy of Julie Andrews playing Maria in The Sound of Music that Stan Majerus, owner of the Rivoli next door, must have procured for him. Birdie yelps in delight, “It’s my favorite too!” But the hills are alive with something other than von Trapps that she doesn’t seem to notice. Bigfoot photos (a government conspiracy) and UFO newspaper clippings (another government conspiracy) also hang on the locker door that Otto withdraws his spy equipment from.

  Tess holds out her hands and says, “Thanks,” but Otto doesn’t place The Eye and the binoculars in them. He grasps them to his chest and asks, “What time are we rendezvousing?”

  She smiles and tells him, “I really appreciate the offer, but this is a two-person operation.”

  “Where my equipment goes, I go. For all I know, you could be using it against me,” Otto says.

  Around a year ago, he’d overheard one of the waitresses say that she was working at the diner to save enough money to attend the CIA—The Culinary Institute of America. She asked when the time came if Tess, her boss, would write her a letter of recommendation. Tess tried to explain the conversation to Otto then, and many times since, but he won’t believe her.

  “For the hundredth time, I’m not a deep operative sent by the CIA to spy on you. My sister and I just want to—”

  “Do a little snooping on Connie,” Birdie says coyly.

  Tess immediately sees where her sister’s going with this. “Yeah,” she says to Otto. “You mentioned that she has a boyfriend and she won’t tell me who it is. I know she meets him on Wednesday nights so we’re going to follow her home from work tonight to…um…satisfy our curiosity.”

  “That killed the cat.” He reaches into his locker, withdraws a fancy-looking camera, says, “Cheese,” to Birdie, and squeezes off a shot. “And you don’t need to follow Connie. I know already know who her boyfriend is.”

  Dare she? The answer could save Tess the anguish of discovering them together in bed. She grits her teeth and asks him, “Who?”

  “That’s classified information,” he says as he carefully replaces the camera and slams his locker shut with a bang that makes both jumpy girls jump. “I gotta get back to the kitchen.”

  Birdie steps in front of him and bats her eyelashes. “We would never ask you to reveal your sources, so maybe this should be a three-person operation, after all.” She drags her finger up his sinewy arm. “Would you consider joining us tonight? We could use a big strong spy man’s help, right, Bess?”

  “Ahhh…I—”

  “Well, when you put it so nice like that….” Otto is practically drooling. “Meet me behind Rivoli’s dumpster at nine hundred hours. Wear black.” He gives the sisters a small salute. “And remember, loose lips sink ships. You get my drift?”

  Tess would’ve missed t
he opportunity to follow Will if compulsive Birdie hadn’t decided that they had to show up two hours earlier at the stakeout than expected. They have a full view of the diner’s parking lot from behind the theatre’s dumpster. Count Your Blessings closed for service at seven the way Will said it would, but mechanic Frank Morton’s well-marked pickup hasn’t shown up, and neither has health inspector Lester Holt’s menacing black van.

  Tess shifts nervously next to her sister when at 7:33 p.m., the staff, who was supposed to be counting beverage bottles and dry goods, files out of the diner’s backdoor toward the parking lot. Will and Connie bring up the rear of the procession. They laugh as they stroll toward the ’57 Chevy together. Tess thought she heard Will say something that sounded like, “After all this time…secret.”

  She crushes her lucky purse to her chest and whispers to Birdie, “What the hell is going on?”

  Her sister shrugs. “Ask Otto.”

  The dishwasher is lingering in the lot until he’s sure that his coworkers are snug in their cars before he trots next door and crouches down behind the movie theatre dumpster with the girls. He’s brushed his electric hair flat, and is wearing a cologne that smells like a combination of bacon grease and Ivory soap.

  Tess has more-pressing questions, but this is a first—she’s never seen him without his aluminum-foil-covered headphones. She points to his head and asks, “Where are your—?!”

  “As an operative of the CIA, you know better than that. The streetlights would reflect off the foil and make too easy to pick up on a satellite,” he says brusquely.

  “Weren’t you and the rest of the staff supposed to be doing inventory while the meat cooler was being repaired?” Birdie asked. “What happened?”

  Otto does an about-face, and tips his black baseball cap to her. “Don’t remember hearing anything about an inventory. We closed up at seven like we were supposed to, then after we broke down our stations, Mister Will told us to enjoy our evenings and gave us the rest of the night off.” He smiles at Birdie. “You look very fetching in black.”

  “Why, thank you, kind sir.”

  Tess groans. “Do you have the equipment, Otto?”

  He unzips the dark gym bag he’s carrying, shows her what he’s got inside, and asks her, “Where’s your vulva?”

  Birdie gasps, but Tess doesn’t. She knows he means her Volvo. Otto’s vocabulary is fluid, and dependent upon what’s currently occupying his mind. Tonight, it appears to be her sister’s private parts. When he was still together with his Russian mail-order bride, he referred to her car as, the “Volga.”

  Tess tells him, “I parked it in the Rivoli’s side lot.”

  He nods in approval. “Go get it. Me and your sister will wait here and see what direction Connie and the Big Boss Man take out of the lot.”

  It concerns Tess that he doesn’t find Will and the hostess leaving together remarkable enough to comment on. Is this a repetitive behavior that he’s witnessed many times over the past few months?

  Give the little lady a Kewpie doll,” Louise says with a carny laugh.

  Tess’s courage completely deserts her. This is way too much for her handle. She makes her way to the car thinking what a stupid idea this was. When she gets back to the lot, she’s going to call the whole thing off. Go home and lick her wounds.

  “What took you so long?” Otto snaps as he and Birdie pile into the backseat of the car when Tessie pulls alongside them. “Go north. Step on it!”

  “But…I…I….” All of her nerve endings are firing at the same time and it feels like she’s under attack from a barrage of gunfire, so rather than tell Otto that she’s changed her mind and wants to abort the mission, she does what she’s told and squeals out of the lot in hot pursuit of Will’s car. She locks onto the Chevy’s distinctive headlights seconds before it makes a turn down Oak. That’s the street Connie lives on.

  Otto says over Tess’s shoulder, “Slow down after you make the turn. Wait at the top of the block until you see Mister Will park, then get a little closer, but not too close, then pull to the curb, and douse the lights.”

  Once they’ve settled into position, Birdie leans forward and asks, “Can you see them?”

  The view to the front door of Connie’s sweet, Craftsman bungalow is partially blocked by a tree, so Tess wasn’t able to witness them leaving the car. She can see them now, though. They’re approaching the front porch. Will has a garment bag over his arm, but still manages to open the door for Connie. So gallant. She’d been hoping that he had simply given his hostess a ride home, so she says downhearted, “The eagle has landed.”

  Otto checks his fancy military watch. “Sun’s gonna set soon. Better to wait a bit and sneak up on them under the cover of darkness.”

  After the fifteen minutes that seem like fifteen hours passes, Tess tells herself, I can’t stand this. I’ve got to know now! She resolutely places her hand on the car door handle seconds before Birdie, who is sticking her head out of the window to get a better look, says, “They’re coming out.”

  Otto wolf whistles from the backseat. “Looks like a hot time on the old town tonight!”

  Tess feels a sudden surge of hope. She says to her sister, “Pass me the binoculars.”

  Enough time hadn’t passed for them to make love and get all duded up to boot. Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am, is definitely not her husband’s style. He must be whisking his floozy somewhere first to wine and dine her because he’s changed out of his work clothes. He looks so handsome in the black pin-striped suit and pearl-gray shirt she’d bought him for his birthday, and Connie stuns in red four-inch heels, seamed nylons, and a cream dress that hugs her dangerous curves. Ruby earrings dangle to her luscious bare shoulders. The honey blond hair she keeps in a tight bun at work streams down her back in perfect waves. Tess can smell her Tabu.

  Otto commands, “Fire up the vehicle, but hold steady and wait for my command.” The three of them hold their breaths as Will pulls away from the curb. “Go!”

  This is all the evidence Tess needs, no use prolonging the agony. She leans back and tells her sister, “Let’s call it a night. I’ve got terrible heartburn. I…I need to go home.”

  Birdie pulls out a pack of Tums and hands her sister two. “Quit imagining the worst,” she says, like that’s doable. “All is not lost.”

  “A course all is not lost,” oblivious Otto says with a snort. “I got the bead on ’em. Turn left on Pleasant.”

  He’s so insistent, and Birdie’s so excited, and Tess is feeling so dispirited that she doesn’t have the strength to argue. She follows Will’s car through the town streets, and then down the two-lane blacktop on the outskirts of Ruby Falls. Where are they headed? The only thing out this far is….

  She kitten mewls.

  “You need another Tums?” Birdie asks.

  Tess shakes her head and says, “I think they’re going out to dinner at…,” her and Will’s special place, “The Edge of Town.”

  “Copy that, Bess,” Otto says when the lights of the Chevy turn into the supper club’s full-to-the-gills lot. “They turned left, you go right. Park over there.” He’s jabbing his finger towards the part of the lot farthest from the entrance.

  Now what? Tess wonders as she switches off the car’s engine with shaking fingers. Should she barge in there and accuse Will with a slap across his face, or wait until the lovebirds finish dinner and trail them back to Connie’s?

  Birdie leaps out of the car and says, “Showtime!” and Otto is right there with her.

  Tess doesn’t budge. She can’t bear to see Will and Connie seated at one of the white table-clothed tables next to the dance floor, or cuddling close in one of the leather booths. Maybe sipping a shared martini. Nibbling on the olive. Seeing them in such an intimate way, it’ll haunt her till the end of her days.

  Tess shouts to Otto and Birdie’s retreating backs, “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

  Her sister knows her too well.

  Birdie sprints back to the car,
sticks her arm through the car window, grabs the keys out of the ignition, and sticks them in her jacket. “Comb your hair and…here.” She pulls a tube of lip gloss out of her black jeans pocket, sweeps it across her sister’s lips, and says, “Put on your Brownie Smile and get out of the goddamn car. Time to face the music.”

  Blurry-eyed Tess can barely make out her accomplices weaving through the parked cars toward the restaurant entrance. She recognizes Stan Olsen’s Cadillac that’s butted up to Jack Loudon’s beat-up Jeep Wrangler. Both men are on Will’s bowling team. Is that why he and Connie are here tonight? Are The High Rollers having some sort of awards banquet tonight? Is she really the last to know?

  The entryway to the supper club is lavish and period-correct. Two massive potted plants sit at the base of a maroon awning. At the end of a carpet of the same color, there stands a burly doorman dressed in a regal-looking black coat with epaulets.

  Roger Turnbull smiles and says, “Good evening, Tess.” When he opens the door, she can hear the band tuning up. People laughing and clinking glasses. “Have fun tonight.”

  When Birdie and Otto disappear into the darkened entry, Tess isn’t hurt by their obvious excitement. Her sister is wild-streaking, and Otto has successfully completed his mission.

  She tells Roger, “I need a minute.”

  The band has eased into the opening strains of Hernando’s Hideaway. It’s her and Will’s song. The one played during their wedding dance, the one she used to hum to him before they tangoed up Chestnut Street as their prelude to making love. Had he requested it?

  Tess is devastated, and intends to make a break for it. She’ll have Roger call her a cab. “Would you mind…?”

  It appears that the time has come to pay another visit to my friend.

  I come up behind her, say, “Fancy meetin’ you here, sugar,” and shove her through the supper-club doors.

  I Know a Dark, Secluded Place

  The house lights had been dimmed, and it takes a few seconds for Tess’s eyes to adjust, so when the “SURPRISE!” comes barreling at her, she ducks.