little smile and opened his mouth, ready to expose his idiotic deception and beg the Fausts’ pardon.
“The truth is—”
That’s all he got out before Tess interrupted.
“It was last spring.”
Jack watched her swallow thickly as she realized she had the Fausts’ undivided attention. They regarded her with polite curiosity, while he had the feeling his own expression held a mixture of gratitude and panicky desperation.
Tess drained the rest of her champagne, stalling shamelessly as she searched her imagination for some plausible explanation. She couldn’t believe she was going to lie, and not just some lie of omission either, but a whopper elaborate enough to satisfy the town’s pre-eminent busybody. A painting hung on the wall behind Cora, a gilt-framed watercolor of a basket of fresh-cut lilies. It gave her an idea.
“Uh, Jack and I met at the French Impressionists exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Art. We’re both huge fans of Monet.”
Tess smiled in relief. She had gone to the exhibit alone, so no one would be able to prove or disprove her story. The Fausts and Jack seemed to be waiting for her to continue, so she did, surprised by how easily it all came to her as one falsehood after another slipped from her lips, transforming her staid, predictable life into something to sigh over.
“Um, we, uh, corresponded for months afterward. And talked on the telephone a lot, too. But it was through his letters that I fell in love with him.” She sent Jack a shy smile that had Cora Faust’s ample bosom heaving in appreciation.
Tess was thinking about the love letters the star-crossed Abelard and Héloïse had sent to one another in the twelfth century. She had studied them in a history class during her freshman year of college. They were beautiful letters, full of passion and heartache and unbearable longing. She had read them with a box of tissues at her side; her heart breaking for two lovers who had remained true to one another despite the horrendous circumstances that forced them apart forever. She wanted a love as pure as that—minus the tragedy, of course.
Tess smiled at Cora and confided, “You get to know a lot about a man by how well he can put his thoughts down on paper.”
“So when’s the big day?” Ira asked.
“We haven’t set a date yet,” Jack responded at the same time that Tess, still caught up in the romantic fantasy she’d been concocting, replied rather dreamily, “June.”
They stared at one another in stricken silence as Ira and Cora looked on in amusement.
“Women always want June weddings, my boy,” Ira said, nodding sagely. “Marriage is about compromise. They demand and we bend.” He added a sly wink when his wife slapped his arm. “Might as well start by compromising on the wedding date.”
“I’ll think about it, sir,” he mumbled, trading champagne for a bracing gulp of Scotch.
The waiter returned for their dinner orders and, for the time being they were spared having to devise any more creative responses. For the next twenty minutes Jack managed to steer the conversation back to Faust Enterprises and his new responsibilities there. But when their entrées arrived, Cora routed the conversation once again to matrimony by exclaiming, “My goodness, dear, where is your engagement ring?”
She captured Tess’s hand and held it up to her myopic eyes for inspection.
“Oh…well,” Tess sputtered.
“Honey,” Jack tsk-ed. “You must have left it next to the bathroom sink in our suite.”
Tess smothered a groan while Cora’s mouth puckered into a shocked O.
“You’re staying in his hotel room?” the older woman asked in a scandalized voice, holding a hand to her bosom.
Tess wanted to die. The sexual revolution might have taken place decades ago, but a woman like Cora Faust, who donned white gloves on Sunday and probably still wore a corset, didn’t hold with co-habitation before marriage. What had Jack been thinking, giving the woman the impression that he and Tess were physically intimate? Tess pictured Cora and the other ladies at Mabel’s Style Haven discussing Tess’s sleeping arrangements as they sat under the dryers, and she knew if her mother caught wind of this, Rita Donovan wouldn’t need a permanent to put curl in her hair.
“N-n-no, ma’am,” she stuttered, offering a prim smile as she fidgeted in her seat like a first-grader caught eating paste. “I got off work at seven, and it was easier to come straight here and get ready upstairs than to drive all the way home and wait for Jack to come pick me up there.”
That much, at least, was the truth. And while Cora nodded, Tess had the feeling the cagey older woman wasn’t completely convinced of Tess’s chastity.
It was almost ten when the waiter brought the check, and Tess left the restaurant on shaking limbs, unable to clearly remember all of the lies she and Jack had spun for the Fausts’ benefit. All she knew for certain was that she had started out the day worried about a midterm exam and ended it with the town’s most celebrated gossip believing she was engaged to, and carnally involved with the gorgeous new vice president of Faust Enterprises.
Tess had traded black silk for denim and cotton, and sat huddled in the front seat of Jack’s rental car waiting for the heat to kick in as they drove back to Earl’s Place. Beside her Jack groaned and muttered, “I can’t believe I let it get this far.”
He’d been saying basically the same thing since leaving the Fausts, but this time Tess felt the need to offer her own bit of editorial comment.
“You? My reputation is in tatters. Cora Faust thinks we’ve been…” she gestured wildly with her hand to fill in the blank. Just thinking the words made her uncomfortable. She couldn’t bring herself to say them aloud.
“We’ve been what?” Jack asked. He turned toward her, and she saw the beginnings of a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
“You know only too well what she thinks we’ve been doing,” Tess croaked. They passed the beauty shop, where gossip was dispensed as freely as the hairspray, and something even more depressing occurred to her. “What if this gets back to my mother? I’m twenty-four, but I may as well be in pinafores as far as my mother is concerned.”
He sent her a sympathetic look before returning his attention to the road.
“On the bright side, at least the man you’re supposedly sleeping with is willing to make an honest woman out of you.” When he glanced her way, Tess sent him a withering look intended to tell him exactly what she thought of his attempt at humor.
“Sorry. Just trying to lighten the mood.”
But Tess didn’t want her mood lightened. She slumped against the headrest and closed her eyes. “What if my family learns of our supposed engagement?” she moaned.
“Maybe they won’t get wind of it. Maybe Cora will keep quiet for a while out of a sense of romance, and by the time she says anything to your family, this entire mess will be resolved. Then you can tell them the truth and have a good laugh over it.”
“Somehow, I doubt they would find this funny.”
Jack brought the car to a stop in the
