‘Did you?’
‘Yeah. I was kind of pretty good,’ I admit.
‘Kind of pretty good?’ he teases. I blush instead of reply and he doesn’t interrogate me further. ‘How was your mum?’
‘Okay, I think. She asked after you.’
‘That’s nice,’ he says half-heartedly.
‘I told her we were getting married.’
‘Did you?’ He looks up, surprised.
‘Yes.’
‘I thought we were going to tell our parents together?’
‘Sorry, it just kind of slipped out.’
‘What did she say?’
‘She was happy for us. Sort of.’
He laughs wryly. ‘I bet. I hope it gave you good practice because we’re going over to Mum and Dad’s for a late lunch tomorrow. Sally and Brenda are going to be there, too.’
Sally and Brenda are Richard’s sisters. They’re a bit full of themselves. Sally is younger than Richard by eighteen months; Brenda is older by three years. Neither has settled down yet, but I did hear through Nathan that Sally has set her sights on one of his employees.
‘Oh, really?’
‘No need to sound quite so excited,’ he says jokily. He knows I’m not a big fan of his sisters and, quite frankly, it’s going to be hard enough telling his parents without having Little and Large making snide comments in the background.
‘Here you go, love.’
‘Thanks.’ I gratefully accept a glass of champagne from Richard’s dad. I’m going to need this.
Anne and Joe’s house is in Mosman, a short drive from Manly. I don’t own a car because I commute to work by ferry quite happily, so we had to take Richard’s truck. He keeps it reasonably tidy, but I always feel like it’s dirty and I regretted my decision to wear a cream dress as soon as I stepped up into the cabin.
‘You look lovely today, Lily,’ Richard’s mum Anne says.
‘Thank you.’ My natural impulse is to dust down my dress. ‘I hope there are no marks on it,’ I say.
‘No, no.’ She glances behind me as I look round at my bum. ‘It’s perfect.’
I do like his parents, but I don’t feel at ease in their home. It’s strange because they’ve never been anything but nice to me.
Anne is a plump woman of about five foot five with tightly-curled brown hair. Richard’s grey-haired father Joe towers above her at six foot three. He’s skinny as a beanpole and has a large nose, upon which sits a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Brenda and Sally take after each of them in stature: Brenda is short and plump, and Sally is tall and willowy. As for Richard, he has his dad’s height, but he’s not lanky. I guess years of pulling his weight on building sites has built up muscles his maths teacher father otherwise lacks.
Anne doesn’t work, but she does knit. A lot. Sally sells some of her hand-knitted children’s rattles in a shop where she works in Manly. It’s actually the shop where Molly used to work before she became Mikey’s full-time mum. I say full-time, but Molly also beavers away at home as a fashion designer. Her offbeat, quirky clothes have become quite popular with Sydney’s trendsetters.
‘How are you?’ Brenda interrupts my thoughts. ‘How’s the job?’
‘I’m good, the job’s fine,’ I reply breezily. ‘How about you?’ Brenda works in finance for a large bank in the city.
‘Fantastic. Business is booming! I can’t believe they ever said we were in a recession;wehaven’t seen any cutbacks.’
‘You’re lucky,’ I comment.
‘Luck! Nothing to do with luck. Life is what you make of it, that’s what I always say.’
