The Wedding Money and the House Money

My sister Kim and I did not ask, because we were raised not to, and so we got nothing and were told we were the sensible ones.

When Mom went into the nursing home in 2015, there was nothing left for her care.

Kim and I paid for her last three years between us, out of grocery money. Jeff sent a card at Christmas with a picture of his boat.

So when one of my children came to me and asked for money, a voice in me that is older than my marriage said, this is how it starts.

This is how the one who asks takes everything, and the old woman ends up with nothing.

I do not say that Kelsey is Jeff. Kelsey is nothing like Jeff.

She has worked since she was fifteen, at the Dairy Queen and then at the vet clinic, where she is a technician now and holds dogs that bite other people.

But I was afraid. I am fifty-six and I have a lunchroom pension that will not pay the light bill.

Rick has a bad shoulder and nine more years before he can draw the full county pension. The twenty-six thousand dollars was the only thing between us and being somebody’s burden.

That is my side. I have told it as fairly as I can. Now I have to tell the part that makes my side harder to hold.

When Kelsey and Jordan got engaged last fall, she came over to talk about the wedding. I was in the kitchen on the phone with my sister Kim, and Kelsey came in the back door without my hearing her.

I was telling Kim about the bills. I said, “I don’t know what we’ll do if Kelsey wants the whole thing. We can’t do that twice. We just can’t. I’d have to go back to cleaning houses on weekends.”

I did not know she heard me. She never said a word about it.

Three weeks later she told us she and Jordan had decided on the courthouse, that they wanted something simple, that big weddings were not their style.

And I was relieved. God forgive me, I was so relieved that I said it out loud at the supper table. “Oh, thank the Lord,” I said. “That’s so sensible of you, honey.”

The courthouse wedding was on a Friday afternoon in June. The magistrate did it in a little room with a flag and a fake ficus.

The witnesses were me, Rick, Ashley, and Jordan’s mother, Pam. Iowa only requires two, but Kelsey wanted four.

I had bought a sheet cake at the grocery store that morning, white with yellow roses, because it was all I could think of.

We ate it off paper plates on the tailgate of Rick’s pickup in the courthouse parking lot.

So I told myself she had what she wanted. I told myself that all the way up until that Sunday in September.

Ashley called me at work during second lunch, while I was walking between tables watching the third graders not eat their green beans. I stepped into the walk-in cooler to take it.

“Mom,” she said, “is it true you’re giving Kelsey eighteen thousand dollars in cash?”

“Nobody is giving anybody anything yet,” I said, with my breath fogging in the cold. “Your father said yes and I said no and we have not talked about it since.”