Chapter 15

The next day, Sal and Kat left to have coffee with Lem. I was looking forward to hearing how it went. I held a meeting with my line leaders among the staff, along with Eleni (to my surprise, looking quite chipper): did we want to buy out our competition? Opinions were mixed. We liked some of their staff, but not others, though we only knew some of them. Would we be better to just poach the ones we wanted? The problem was, the ones we wanted were the faithful ones who would stick with their projects and customers, and go down with the ship, not the ones that would abandon their team. We decided Eleni would make an extra visit to me the next day to go through organizational details, to see what would be possible.

The kids were on holidays, and spending their time sleeping, playing games, watching youtube etc, doing some projects around the house. Or making love, for some of them. And Zach was spending at least a couple of hours a day sitting in on meetings and working on a customer project.

Maybe today would be that restful day I wanted?

After lunch, Kat and I talked, and the subject was Lem.

“Lem looks really good. I mean, hot. Ripped. What the hell did you do to him? And she’s hot for him. And when he saw her ... I mean, she dressed pretty conservatively, but no hiding that she’s back at her best now. She’s turning heads everywhere anyway, and Lem’s head spun. Sparks were flying from the beginning. When we first saw him, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get Sal to leave. And he said all the right stuff, and so did she. Love, they’re going to be on with each other, there’s no doubt. The only question is the details. I let them do a little bit of verbal foreplay, but Sal was disciplined and stopped when I said, and left when I said. In the car, she got herself off while we were driving back.”

“So there’s no way they’re doing coffee again. At least, not just coffee. Sal won’t be able to contain herself, and nor will he. And she was kind of afraid of it in the car. She’s crazy mad for her husband, but tumbling straight into bed on their first or second date ... Nah, life is too complicated for that.”

“I think the most I interesting part was when we showed him the photos. I mean, the photos he wanted to see were the ones with Jael. He loves both of them, but Jael ... he’s obsessed and that’s where her obsessiveness comes from, I think. He loved the photo of her on the side of the pool. He’s going to take that photo of her on the side of the pool and turn it into a massive poster, along with the photo of Michael at the entrance to his tent.” – next to his carved sign, which was very elaborate now – “Then, we showed him the photo of Jael and Toni in their bedroom. It was interesting, you know. He took a little time to warm to it. Maybe it was because it was such a big message to him. Or maybe he was just dealing with seeing Toni as well, but he said that he was happy she was so happy, and that he’d changed the way he thought about things. I thought he seemed genuine about that.”

“So, at the end, I asked him if maybe he should come to dinner at our place rather than doing coffee again. I said I’d have to talk to you about it, but he would really like to do that. And you know what? He’s got their house on the market, with an offer on it. She needs to decide, but the reason is that if he can sell it, they can move over here somewhere, because he figures that his kids won’t accept being more than a quick trip from their cousins.”

Wooah, that’s serious. We talked about it, and how to approach it with Jael and Michael. We agreed that key to any progress would be getting Lem and Sal to talk openly to each other about their sexual history and activity this year, and how they treated each other. Until they cleared the air about that, any progress would be a fantasy. But how to do that? Kat was going to talk to Sal about it.

That night, I was sitting on the side of the bed. I was feeling ... a bit funny. Some discomfort in my abdomen. Not sure...

Kat came in, and she came and sat on my lap, kissing me. “You know, we should get Sal to do another performance for the six of us and fantasize about Lem. That’d be amazing hot, and maybe it’ll help to deal with it?”

“Or it might make her worse,” I replied. “But it would be smoking hot.”

We kissed. Suddenly an invisible hand squeezed my insides. I was filled with pain like I had never experienced. They ask you how much pain it is on a scale of one to ten ... I’d never call my pain a ten, so this was maybe an eight? But there was no way I could have talked about this. I could barely think, lying on the floor, rolling around, cold and sweaty. I was having trouble breathing.

I vaguely heard Kat talking to me ... what was she saying? Yes she was worried ... Yes, indeed. I tried to talk ... I could hold her hand, and I did that.

I figured I was dying. Kat was crying, I could tell. And Zara was with us. And then Michelle was holding me, holding my wrist and counting.

The pain eased off a little, and I could smile at Kat. We hugged, but then the pain was back.

Some uniforms came into my vision. Ambulance. They got me to breathe in through a green pipe.

That green pipe was magic. I could function again, and tell the ambulance officers my symptoms.

They put me on a stretcher, with a lovely warm blanket over me, and Zach and Tim helped them carry me down to the ambulance, all the family was watching. I was lucid, but not really with it. Kat was in the ambulance with me, and we were going to the nearest emergency department, at the hospital of my best client. I remembered to tell Kat to tell Eleni not to visit tomorrow. I know they talked on the phone, but I zoned out for a few minutes. Then Kat was holding me again. I smiled at her, and she cried some more.

At the hospital, the doctor looked at me immediately, and examined me, and then sent me off for a CT, which happened straight away. Odd, I didn’t think it was that easy? Then we had to wait for a surgeon, and my family talked to me over the phone – only Kat was allowed to be with me, because of tight covid restrictions. Then the surgeon arrived, and it was all process again.

He said that the CT showed that my gall bladder was obstructed. Pain was coming and going all night, and I wasn’t always aware of what was around me. They operated on me first thing in the morning. I think maybe I gave consent, or maybe Kat did it.

I slowly become aware of my surroundings, I was in a hospital bed, hooked up to various devices. Kat was holding my hand, and a nurse was checking on me. I smiled at Kat.

I woke up. Just Kat was with me. I croaked, “hi.” She smiled and gave me some water to drink. Then she held my face gently, and asked, “How are you feeling?”

It was a big effort to talk. “OK”. I smiled.

I lay and watched. Nurses came and went. Doctors came and checked on me. Other people came by. Kat stayed with me always, holding my hand. My room seemed very busy. Around lunch time I started feeling a lot better, and they took my oxygen line out. Kat was allowed to get on the bed and she did, lying next to me holding me gently. I kissed my babe.

I had had time to think. I didn’t mind dying, I’d had a good life. And I knew my kids will be OK, even Toni. But I minded very much leaving Kat alone, and missing out on her adventures. I told her that, and she held me and cried, great sobs of anguish. I knew, she had to let it out. I wished I could get my arm around her.

The surgeon came back and checked on me. They’d removed a big gall stone – he showed it to me – and I was definitely going to be fine. He was happy with my recovery. He thought that usually I’d be in overnight, but since no one could visit me due to covid, he’d send me home that evening, if I promised to be careful, and my family looked after me. And then it would be total bed rest for 48 hours, followed by a few days gradually getting around, and then it would be pretty much back to normal. Finally, he said that Eleni would visit me soon, even though no one else was allowed.

Eleni? Oh yes, he said, she was his second cousin once removed or something - Greek families, you know? Anyway, she had called him last night, and when he found out who I was, they put me at the top of every list they had. The CEO was going to visit after Eleni. The hospital wanted their chief infrastructure guy back at work as soon as possible, but family was more important than that.

How about that. Interesting too, because hospital visits were banned except for Kat.

Eleni visited. She gave both of us a big hug, and then we talked. Eleni pulled up a virtual meeting on her tablet with my family, and all of them joined. They so wished they could visit and they’d be lined up in excitement when I came home. Then Eleni set up a call with my company and every single person working for the company joined the call to wish me the best. Amazing. They assured me all was fine, and I was not to think about work for a few days. Then Eleni held Kat, and asked how she was. Tough for her, Eleni knew, and was there anything Eleni could do for us? Because she would. Kat had wanted a bunch of things from home, but if I was going home ... so no need. But she liked the support, and they sat on my bed hugging, which warmed my heart.

Given that I wasn’t allowed visitors, we had rather a lot of them. All of them were hospital employees, of course. The CEO. The networking team I work with. Eleni’s uncle. Pete – turned out he did sessions at the hospital, though I worked with him elsewhere. And I had a few phone calls. The owner of the other company called to wish me well and say he’d wait for a couple of weeks, and for me to just get well. Lem called, though we didn’t talk seriously. Even my parents and Andy my brother called - wow.

Otherwise, Kat and I rested, and talked slowly. And hugged, now that I could get my arm around her.

At six pm, they cleaned me up and sent me home. Kat wheeled me out on a wheelchair, and I very carefully got into the car. Kat sat next to me for the slow trip home – I was still in quite a lot of pain when we went over bumps, but Tim drove as carefully as he could, while Michelle fretted from the front seat. And then, the whole family lined up as I arrived home, and Michelle and Zara helped me walk very slowly up our stairs.

In our lounge room, they’d opened up our lounge into a bed, and put it in the middle of the room. I laid down on the bed, and they all sat around me, excited to have me home. I promptly went straight to sleep, and pretty much slept the next 12 hours. It seemed every time I roused there was someone else lying in bed with me, but then it was Kat through the night, and Kat and Sal who helped me up in the morning to the toilet. Sal had slept on the floor so that she’d be there if needed, though Kat said that everyone had wanted to.

Then, I was back in the bed, lying there. All day, I never wanted for anything – there was always someone with me, lying on the bed next to me, in case I wanted for anything, or to talk to me, or just to hold me while I slept.

I had some really intimate heart to heart talks with my family while I was lying there.

Jael lay there with me. She’d grown while with us, both physically and emotionally. We had a long talk about her future. The easiest subject was swimming: did she want to go the Olympics? I thought she was sufficiently obsessive that she might make it. She wasn’t sure, it would take her away from our home. Well, that led to us talking about Lem. Sal had told her how the visit with Lem went, and Jael was deeply conflicted about it. She wanted Sal to be happy but she wasn’t sure about Lem at all, and she was certain that she wasn’t leaving our home. Sadly, and we talked at length about this, I wasn’t sure that was possible for her to stay. She cried, when she understood. She told me that Sal had agreed that she could enrol in the same school as Toni. But you know the first thing we talked about? She’d finally broken her streak, and put some clothes on, when the ambulance officers came. “That’s about the only reason I can imagine doing it for”. Well, I was glad we sorted that out.

Zach lay there with me and we had a lovely talk about his future. Now that he loved Zara, he was thinking much more about tomorrow, not just today. And Zara was very committed to their relationship, in the way only a sixteen-year-old girl could be, but then much more again. He was dreaming of a future where he ran the business, and Zara ran the house, and the rest of us came and went from the home as our base for our lives and our holidays. Yes, he said, you and mum will travel Australia and the world, but you’ll always come back here. And the rest of us will come and go, but someone needs to hold everything together, and that’s us. And Zara will have lots of children and we’ll hardly need any clothes, and all will be right with the world. And you know what? For a sixteen-year-old boy, that’s a pretty solid vision. Even if I had the experience to know how hard it would be to keep that together.

Michelle came and went through the day, doing my actual nursing. I still had a drain line that a real nurse would visit and remove the next day, but she could no more resist doing Obs on me than she could resist breathing. Eventually I dragged her into bed with and told her to stay.

“How’s my most precious baby?”

She laughed. “Dad, it’s been a little while since you held me like a baby.”

I know. Things have changed. I looked pointedly down at her body, and she laughed, pushing her tits out at me. “Yes,” I said, “I can tell. Just.”

“You’re all grown up now. I’m really proud of how you turned out. So full of life and uninhibited. And I think you’ve chosen really well with Tim. You know we were a bit nervous about him moving in.” I laughed. “And then all the others moved in, and we were like, why did we even think about it with Tim? Anyway, he’s a lovely addition to the family.”

Michelle snuggled with me and said, “I’ve got a secret to show you.” She showed me her hand, her ring finger. There was a very faint marking on her ring finger, a ring drawn into place. “Yes, we got the idea from Zach. Tim has one too. It’s our engagement rings, until we get around to asking you formally.”

“What a lovely idea. I’m so happy for you. We’ll do our best to make you happy. Does Kat know?”

“Not yet. It’s our secret for a few more days. But Dad ... it’s Tim who makes me happy.”

I smiled at her, and she started pumping her hips as a joke.

“You know, you are remarkably young to get engaged. People change a lot as they get a job, their own place, their own identity. Will you still be happy after that? We worried about this when Tim moved in, given that he agreed he was under our authority, that you wouldn’t have your own relationship space, and you wouldn’t come up with lasting habits that way.”

Michelle looked at me thoughtfully. “We have talked about this quite a lot, actually. Living together here under lockdown makes that a bigger issue again. But we decided, in the end, that committing to grow together is better than not committing to it. And it’s not like you ever tell Tim what to do.”

Then she told me about her future plans. They’d looked at the state of the world and agreed that travel wasn’t going to happen for ages. So that whole travel plan was off the table, and they were now planning to be home, here, as long as they could, and there was no reason why that wasn’t a very long time. She still very much wanted to be a nurse, and maybe, she thought, a mid-wife. Babies are awesome, she said. But not for me for a long time yet, she laughed. I’ll leave that to Zara.

Zara was next. She can and lay next to me, wiggled till my arm was between her breasts, and then nuzzled into my ear.

“I’m so glad you’re back, Dad.”

We talked about her schooling first. She’d done really well during lockdown. Not because she liked remote schooling; she didn’t at all, but because she was free and motivated to be her best. And when she’d seen her mother to introduce Zach to her, her mother had approved of Zach as her master, and then handed over her school report, and signed a couple of things for her. So it seemed like that was sorted for now. But what about her future?

Well, long term, her vision was Zach’s vision – no surprise there. Stay home, run the home, love the family, have lots of babies, and shower love on everyone. I challenged her on that – is that what she wants? When she’s settled a little bit more, and more mature, will such a small circle be enough for her? Don’t you want a job?