One Fiancee To Go, Please. Jackie Braun

and a little excited. “Don’t tell me that Pleasant River’s very own Tess Donovan is your fiancée?”

      “Young man, why didn’t you mention that your girl was a local?” Ira admonished good-naturedly. “This is extraordinary.”

      “Hello, Mr. Faust,” Tess said. Jack noticed her discreetly wiping her palm on her dress before shaking the older man’s hand. Turning to Ira’s wife, she said, “It’s good to see you again, Mrs. Faust.”

      They were seated, and the waiter came for their drink order, forestalling what Jack knew was only the inevitable. Tess ordered a club soda, apparently determined to keep a clear head. Jack, however, ordered Scotch. False courage, he decided, was better than nothing. The black-vested server had barely moved out of hearing range when Cora lobbed the first verbal volley of what promised to be a long evening of probing questions.

      “Tess, dear, I ran into your mother just last month at the beauty shop. We chatted while I was waiting for my manicure to dry. She never mentioned your engagement. When exactly did this occur?”

      “Um, well, actually…” Tess turned to Jack, her gaze silently beseeching him to clear up this misunderstanding before it went any further.

      For the millionth time, he wondered why he had listened to Davis’s foolish suggestion, even as he admitted that the plan had worked splendidly. He had the job. And, God help him, he wanted to keep it. Below the folds of the linen tablecloth he reached for Tess’s hand, offering a reassuring squeeze, and sent her a look that begged for understanding.

      “It happened rather suddenly. In fact, we haven’t told our families yet. We wanted it to be secret, just for a little while longer. I’m sure you can understand that.” His gaze strayed to Cora and he winked at the older woman, as if including her in some Shakespearean plot. Cora’s eyes misted, evidence, Jack decided, of her romantic heart. He felt himself relax a bit.

      “Oh, of course. Ira and I were young once. I remember how love was at the beginning. Not that it’s not still wonderful after all these years, but at first it’s all…” she seemed to hunt for the right word, then, she sighed, “…magic.”

      “This calls for a toast,” Ira announced, giving Jack an affectionate thump on the back. The waiter had just arrived with their drinks, but as he transferred them from the tray to the table, Ira said, “Any proper toast must be done with champagne.”

      The waiter returned and was filling their glasses with sparkling wine when Cora said, “Where on earth did you two kids meet? Ira tells me you’re from Boston, Jack. When did Tess take a trip to Boston?”

      The tale they had concocted in the car clearly no longer applied.

      “That’s actually a very interesting story, isn’t it Tess?” Jack began, buying time. Tess nodded vigorously, and he watched her gulp down champagne, nearly emptying the fluted glass before she returned it to the table. Apparently she also needed a little false courage now. Always one to oblige a woman in distress, he reached over to refill her glass.

      “You were saying,” Cora prompted helpfully.

      “Um, yes, how Tess and I met. It’s a very interesting story,” he repeated inanely. His mind, however, remained stubbornly blank. Ira and Cora Faust seemed to lean forward in their seats, as if willing the words out of his mouth, but no matter how fast his brain searched for a scenario they would believe, nothing came. It was no use, he decided. He sent Tess an apologetic 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