Chapter 12: Final Week

Larissa had a busy day on the Friday, the last day before her wedding. She did get Julian to go surfing in the morning, and then they had a busy day of chores, getting ready for the wedding and their holiday, but the centre of the day was ‘Lunch with the Parents’.

Julian and Larissa didn’t know much about it – just that Sophie had asked them to have lunch, a parents of the bride and groom thing, and sent her an address. Intrigued, Larissa had looked it up, and it was just some random house in a suburb near the sea – whatever. But Sophie had been quite definite about it, so they’d squeezed it into their day, and they were happy to bend over backwards for their parents, who’d been so wonderful to them. But ... what was going on?

Well, a few minutes before they were due, they arrived at the address, and found a plain unmarked gate. They turned into the driveway and followed it for a very long way – past a few houses behind tall fences, and then through a vineyard, before ending up at a little carpark. Wow, Larissa realised, they were at the top of a cliff looking over the bay – what an absolutely fantastic view! What was this place? And there were several cars there – she recognised one of them immediately: James and Sophie. Well, they were in the right place, then – Julian had been sure that there was some mistake.

A young girl – could only be fourteen at most – welcomed them by name when they got out of their car. “Hi, Julian and Larissa, welcome to our house! When you’re ready, I’ll show you to lunch. And it’s such a pleasure to meet both of you, I’m a huge fan, and Mum says I’m allowed to ask you for autographs later, if you don’t mind!”

“Well, sure, of course,” Larissa said, “but, like, where are we, and what’s your name?”

The young girl laughed. “Oh, this is our house, and my name is Jenna. Mum has a little business on the side, catering for lunches, and you’re our guests for today. Come this way, please.” As they followed Jenna, they could see that it really was her house, and she led them around the side, and pointed out the toilets, and then walked them past an amazing infinity pool with incredible views over the bay, and then to a little bungalow next to it. The little bungalow was completely open to the outside, and was filled by a table with the rest of the guests around it, and lunch spread out on the table.

The guests were all standing to welcome them. Larissa smiled, thrilled at the guest list: Dave, Kat, Lem, Sal, Bob, Mary, her mum, and finally, James and Sophie. Kisses and deep hugs all around, what a wonderful thing for them to organise! She held each of them tight, and they told her how excited they were for her and Julian, and how much they were looking forward to the wedding, and she could listen to Julian, standing next to her, getting the same. Last of all, she hugged Sophie.

“Oh, this is so lovely, thank you so much for organising this! I just expected the two of you, but I should’ve listened more carefully to what you said, huh?” Sophie laughed at her, thrilled with her response. “And just how did you find this place?”

“Oh, she’s a friend of a friend of Mary’s, and they come here fairly often to entertain their guests.”

Yep, that made sense, though she turned to Mary and said, “Wow, thanks, what an awesome place to bring your guests, but what if the weather’s bad?”

Mary smiled, and pointed out where the bungalow could be closed up, all glass windows, and said, “Beth just shuts the place up, and the view can actually be even more amazing, storms coming across the bay.”

Finally, they sat down around the table, and Beth and Jenna brought out the rest of the food, and for a few minutes, they busied themselves grabbing food from the table, and Jenna offered them all whatever they wanted to drink – all non-alcoholic drinks, Larissa was pleased to see.

Once they all had food, James grabbed their attention and said, “Thanks everyone for being here. Julian and Larissa, we’re here for two reasons: firstly, to share with you how pleased and excited we are that you’re getting married.” He paused here for a chorus of agreement, and Larissa and Julian smiled at them all. “And also, we all love you deeply, and we wanted to share with you our own perspective of what being married is like, both the wonderful thrills and satisfaction, as well as the hard heart-breaking challenges that one way or another you’ll have, as much as we all would love for you not to have them. We had dinner together earlier this week, and we all agreed that this is how we can most love you.” Then he smiled. “And one real benefit of having so many parents is that you can get quite a broad perspective on what that means. Because we can all see that neither of you are going to have a plain and boring life. Both individually and especially together.”

Wow, Larissa thought, and tried to absorb that. Julian was quicker off the mark than she was. “Wow! Right now, I’m specially excited to have lots of parents – we can totally pick the story we like!”

Everyone laughed, and then Larissa said, “Seriously, though, it really is lovely for us that we have multiple people that care for us so deeply. I really feel so lucky this year, and you’ve all been so unexpectedly loving and wonderful.” That got lots of smiles, and then she said, “It’s nearly a year to the day since I met Sal and Kat at that café. All of you have made just so much difference to me, and for us.” She heard Julian grunting his agreement and saw him nodding.

That started a round of recollections, and aligning of memories, and then James guided everyone back to the subject, and started going round the table so that each couple could talk about their marriage. Lem and Sal went first. Interesting – Larissa knew more about the private pain in their marriage than any of the others except her own mum, and the way they told it – glossing over the depth of the pain, but making the actual issues very clear ... that set her expectations for the others. And there were very strong lessons for Julian and Larissa, from what Lem and Sal said – constantly being willing to re-examine one’s decisions, beliefs, actions, and really meaningfully committing to being together. And also, there is forgiveness and reconciliation, and it can be genuine.

Then it was Dave and Kat’s turn, and Larissa was deeply surprised to hear Kat’s story of her teenage years – way wilder than hers, way wilder than she could believe. Yes, she understood Kat’s mother’s expectation that Kat would die young – and then her sudden redemption by Dave, and then having children early, to her surprise. And then she was totally surprised to hear that Dave and Kat nearly fell apart when their kids were young ... and how hard it was for them to recover. She shook her head, listening to that. If it was hard for them ... but recover they did. Still, the same issues, they kept cropping up, she heard. More lessons, she understood, and by this time she had her phone out making notes. Keeping a relationship alive takes hard work at every level, and keeping forgiving the same things.

She’d wondered, when James said ‘couples’, what exactly the status of her mum was, and then Bob and Mary talked about their own relationship, with no mention of her mum – the difficulty of Mary transiting from famous socialite to struggling mother, all while Bob gained wealth and importance, and Bob struggling to choose between family or money and everything that went with that. He’d repeatedly needing reminding about family, but then he’d chosen to invest deeply in Mary, to pay her back for her trust in committing to him and having his children, and that had lifted her back up to feel like his real partner. Wow, Larissa understood that dynamic – and then they talked about the way that their sexually adventurous marriage helped Mary but then almost blew them up twice ... dangerous stuff, since it seemed like almost any woman would jump into bed with Bob.

Suddenly their story changed, and her mum was in the picture. She’d thought to herself that their relationship was all one way healing for her mum, but no, it was way more reciprocal than that – she healed them just as much. And her mum’s terrible back story, her own life, about trust that wasn’t rewarded, and faithfulness in the wrong thing – interesting, because Dave and Sal both commented to her and Julian after that: they wanted Julian and Larissa to be faithful, and happy, but don’t get trapped in a downward spiral just to be faithful. But her mum’s choices ... hard ones, she understood. At least she was happy now.

Then James and Sophie ... happy always ... only, not that deeply happy; easily stuck in a rut and taking each other for granted. And Sophie’s feeling of being trapped and jaded that had grown over the years until Larissa’s arrival had turned the family around. Interesting ... Larissa hadn’t picked up on some of that, and realised that she still had a long way to go in terms of her own emotional intelligence; it wasn’t just Julian who needed to work on that.

Finally, they were done. Larissa looked at Julian and could see that he was as affected as she was. “Wow,” she said. “We got the marriage talk from Tim and Vicki, but I think we just got our real marriage talk right now. You’ve given us both a lot to think about, and I think that I have a much deeper perspective into the journey we’re on. Thanks so much.”

Julian agreed. “Yes, very much so. We really appreciate your openness, and we’ll talk a lot about what you’ve said while we’re on holiday. I really hope that we learn from all that and build something as good for both of as we can.” And then, since he had looked at Larissa nodding her head when he said that, “Yes, we both do. I joked before about choosing the story that we liked, but we both know that we need to live the best out of all those stories.”

They stopped serious discussion and had some more food, and Jenna served them coffees or whatever, and then Julian asked Bob whether he’d had any follow up about the whole incident with dumping chemicals in the river. Bob got a predatorial grin on his face, and said, “I sure did! It took them about a week, and then that CEO called me on my unlisted private number. I was in a meeting so I made him call back. So when he did, he ... well, he didn’t find out why I was supporting you guys at all, just launched into how we corporate interests needed to stick together against the radical leftie greenies, and he had a whole lot of business to send my way if we could align our thinking on this.” He got a reflective look on his face. “Guess he talked to someone who only knew what I was thinking early last year. For sure, I’ll never give him a job ... poor prep work on this part. So then I explained why I was supporting you – both the principles part, and then also the family bit. Which meant that I pointed out to him that his goons attacked the man who will be my son-in-law next week. That got a long silence, I could just about hear him swearing to himself, panicking. Then I told him I was feeling it, too. What was he thinking? Well then he didn’t know what to do, so he suddenly lost signal. I mean, really?”

Everyone was laughing, but James and Dave most of all – they found that bit particularly funny. “So then I sent him a message saying that I was interested to hear what he had to say when he found signal again, and pointed out that Telstra have pretty good coverage these days.” That really set James off in particular.

“So then he called back later, and said, ‘what did I want?’ And I said, that I didn’t want anything at all, and I had a task force looking across all my businesses seeing how we could not do business with any of his businesses.” He grinned at the surprise in Julian and Larissa’s faces. “Not really. I mean, I did have a business analyst making a list, in case he called, and we’d found that they’d do a lot worse than us. So then we had a short and sharp business negotiation and the upshot is that I’m getting all the business he was going to offer us in the first place, and I’m going to jack up all the contracts of the existing work on top of the routine CPI increase. And they’re going to buy power from Thomas too. And if he doesn’t find a similar Youtube channel to Layna to sponsor, then I’ll mention why all that’s happening in my annual report. Which will destroy whatever’s left of his bonus.” He laughed and shrugged. “I’d say, poor CEO, but you play with the big boys, got to play big boy games.”

Wow. While everyone else laughed, Larissa looked at the smug expression on Bob’s face. Yeah, that was all quite funny, but she also realised that there was a reason he was well on the way to being a billionaire. He sure belonged with the ‘big boys’, and no matter how nice he was to her and Julian, treating them like family, he very much had the skills and killer instinct he needed, and she better be really careful around him.

Then Bob said, “Enough of that. Julian and Larissa, your rules around wedding presents are very practical and reflect your principles really nicely.” Where was this going, Larissa wondered? “But we talked about that amongst us and discovered that all of us felt that we, as your parents, shouldn’t be so constrained as your other wedding guests, and had planned accordingly. And one of the reasons for our lunch today is so that we can give you our wedding presents now without embarrassing your other guests. We’ll give you something within the rules tomorrow, but we each have something different for you today.”

Wow! Larissa looked at Julian, who was just as surprised as she was. But duh, it should’ve been obvious that Bob, in particular, wouldn’t accept being bound by their rules. And just what was Bob going to give them? She glanced at Julian – he thought the same, clearly. She took his hand and pulled it under the table so they could signal each other – she just felt a bit uncertain about what was coming. Still, they were going to get given stuff, so it couldn’t really be a problem? Could it?

“So we’re going first for this too,” Sal said, with a smile. “Julian and Larissa, you’re such a gift for us, priceless. And so Lem made a little something for you that expresses how we feel.” Lem stood up and picked up a box from the corner, and both Sal and Lem came and stood behind them and jointly gave them the box. Julian took it and opened the top of the box and presented it for Larissa to look inside. Stunned, she reached into the box and pulled out a wooden carving and showed it to Julian.

She’d heard about this, Lem’s carvings. And this one was truly amazing – about fifty centimetres high, a carving that had no fine features but was still recognisably the two of them hugging in their safe space, entwined, kissing, and tied together. “Wow,” Larissa said. “I don’t know what to say. This is literally the most incredible piece of art I’ve ever seen – so wonderful. And it’s totally us! Lem, I heard that you were gifted but this...” she shook her head.