Poor and Proud

She looked straight in my eyes and asked, "How about you? Have you missed our marriage? Or at least the many good times we had together?"

"To be honest, you choose the right time to leave me because I had and still have so many other problems that I haven't had much time to think about the past because I must focus all my efforts on the future."

"Is it possible for me to be included in your future?"

"Of course, you are the mother of my children."

"Our children want both their mother and their father. We can still stop the sale of their home and be a family again. Can't we?"

"No, because I don't want to live there, neither in that house nor in the damn village a day longer than necessary. Our divorce doesn't make any difference about our children's parents. Your boyfriend will never be their father and Elise will never be their mother. It will always be you and me but I can't see any reason for us living together for that reason."

"We can still hope that time will heal our wounds."

"Yes, it hopefully will."

That was it. I had remained polite, not raised my voice and resisted all temptation to call her names. We shared the bill, shook hands and parted.

Back in my house Elise immediately asked me if I had any news to tell her and I told her Nathalie's suggestion and my reply. Then she asked if I had managed to avoid accusing Nathalie for all the problems and calling her names. I told her the truth that it had been a very polite meeting and I had avoided saying anything at all when Nathalie said that Kim was a mistake because it was her problem. Why should I care?

Elise asked me if I was greedy man when I told her about the shared bill but accepted my explanation that my reason was avoiding giving Nathalie any signals about personal interest for our meetings.

Then life began to roll on at increasing speed. I had to live somewhere when my house was sold and when I asked Elise about buying a house together, she became very interested, began immediately searching for suitable alternatives and within a short time we had found our dream house. It was expensive but not impossible and we signed the contract but had to wait two months before moving in. The sale of her apartment and my part of my house gave much more than we had dreamt about getting.

One evening Elise held up her left hand and asked me if I could imagine what was missing. I asked, "A ring of gold?"

"No."

"Two rings?"

"Yes."

I proposed, she said "yes" and as it was the "second trip" for both of us we decided not to make much noise of it. We planned on a wedding at the city hall and a weekend trip to Euro Disney in Paris with our children.

Our relationship had begun at Camilla's dinner, so we invited her and Sebastian for dinner on a Saturday evening to celebrate our engagement. I noted that they gave each other some funny looks when we told them about our plans about a small wedding and asked them to be our only witnesses, because it was they who had brought us together.

Sebastian began coughing and said, "Brought together? We left you alone for two minutes and you fell in love. Incredible, but truthful."

However, they agreed to be our witnesses and join us at a lunch afterwards. Parties for friends and relatives would be held later when we got the house in order.

My company began to show better and better results and several people who had left us during the crisis were back again. Camilla spent most of her time at my company with marketing and was very good at that. Sebastian had introduced me to a gang of funny guys who used to meet twice a month for shooting replicas of the famous old Colt Peacemaker black powder gun.

Elise's and my wedding was planned on a Wednesday and the week before Sebastian rang us and invited us and our children for dinner and asked us to be dressed up for the wedding pictures because his friend, a professional photographer, wanted to take them before the dinner because he would be out of town on Wednesday.

We didn't see any problems with that because for an eleven o'clock wedding in the city hall Elise had bought nice blue dresses for her and the girls, while the boy and I would be wearing dark suits. Elise was worried about the flowers but Sebastian told her that the photographer would fix it afterwards.

On Saturday evening Sebastian rang us and said that he had sent a taxi to pick us up. To our surprise he had sent a limousine and the driver told us that he was doing his job and had no comments when we asked about the journey, which to our surprise went out of the city and ended at an old historic mansion, which was restored and used for conferences during the weekdays and for birthday and wedding parties during the weekends.

Camilla and Sebastian met us outside the front door and told us to wait a minute and that we had to go in a special order when we went in. Then Sebastian said a word in his cell phone, the doors opened and we went in with the children first, Elise and I with Camilla and Sebastian behind us.

We got a shock; the restaurant/ballroom was filled with people, now standing at dinner tables and among the people I recognized my employees with spouses, friends and relatives. A band played Mendelssohn's Wedding March while we walked along the aisle to the other side of the room, where we saw a small table with a white cloth.

On the table were two lighted candles, a bible, a ring and Elise's wedding flowers. Elise was pale and held my hand in a firm grip. Then one of the guys from the black powder gang, dressed as a priest came to us and said, "We, your relatives and friends are gathered here to share and celebrate your happiness. But first we must have a short official ceremony to have something to celebrate."

Then he held the standard wedding ceremony of the national church, which is almost the same as in all equal countries.

Though it was a total surprise, it was a beautiful ceremony with both religious and secular music. Everything was professionally recorded on a DVD.

It was the most amazing surprise party I ever heard about in our Scandinavian town. The whole evening was great with so many people involved. Sebastian gave an amusing speech, which began with how Elise and I met and how she was blooming like a nice flower after she had met me.

Even one of my employees had many positive things to say about me. Elise's boss was a good speaker and said that her fellow workers had noted a sudden difference in her manners and were wondering until they found out the reason.

After the dinner, the party went on with dancing to a good band and when the kids became tired, Elise's sister and her husband had a rented a family room at the estate where they had a room for the kids. About two o'clock at night, Camilla gave me a room key and said that if we wanted to spend the night there was a nice room waiting for us.

We went to the band and the vocalist gave us the microphone so we could give a short speech and once again thank everybody for a pleasant and memorable surprise. In our room we found an ice bucket with a bottle of Champagne and a bowl with strawberries.

Elise was worried about a big bill for the party but I suggested she save such problems for the next day and enjoy our great night. We had very tender long lasting sex with some breaks for Champagne and strawberries.

Epilogue

Of course, we got billed for all private matters we had booked in advance for our wedding but didn't succeed in getting any further information about payment for the party. We understood that Camilla and Sebastian had been two of the leading characters organizing it and I even found out that Camilla's employer was one of the main owners of the mansion but all our questions about our bill got a friendly but resolute reply that it wasn't anything for us to worry about. Even our relatives, friends and my employees refused to tell us anything.

My company's co-operation with our Polish sub-contractor went well and it began to give us a fair profit. Our former customer, Martin E. Malund, had so many problems with his cheap Bulgarian supplier that he wanted a negotiation with us for a big order and I got him to accept a 9 percent increase in our previous prices.

Still now and then I can feel how it was to fall down in my "black hole" and I'm very grateful to the two women, without whom I probably would have still been down there. Thanks to Camilla I could save my company, my own and many other people's jobs. However the best of everything is that I met Elise and got a loving wife.