The Wedding Money and the House Money

“Because if she gets cash,” Ashley said, and her voice shook, “then I should have gotten cash too. I never asked for that wedding, Mom. You wanted that wedding. You picked the photographer. You picked the hall.”

That was true too. I am the one who said we should get the photographer from Cedar Rapids instead of the girl from church who did it for six hundred.

I am the one who wanted the band instead of the deejay.

I married Rick in my parents’ living room with a borrowed dress and a Jell-O salad. I wanted my daughter to have the day I did not have.

I wanted it for her, and I wanted it for me, and I am not sure, even now, which want was bigger.

“I’m not ungrateful,” Ashley said. “It was beautiful. But Tyler and I have been saving for a house for two years and we’ve got eleven thousand dollars. If Kelsey gets eighteen thousand to put down, she’ll be in a house before us, and I’ll have had a party.”

“So you think we should say no,” I said.

“I don’t know what I think,” she said. “I think it’s not fair either way. I think I want to give you back the wedding and I can’t.”

Then a second grader dropped a whole tray outside the cooler door and I had to go.

Rick and I did not talk about it for a week. We were polite.

He went to work at six and came home at five and sat in the garage with the radio on, sharpening the blades on the mower he would not need again until April.

On the Saturday, I walked out to the garage with two cups of coffee and sat on the overturned bucket by the workbench. He kept filing. I let him file.

“She’s not asking for a gift,” he finally said. “She’s asking whether we love her the same. That’s what she’s asking, Carol Ann. You know that’s what she’s asking.”

“And I’m asking whether we’re going to be living in Ashley’s spare room when we’re seventy,” I said. “Both of those can be true, Rick.”

He set the file down. “Twenty-six thousand dollars doesn’t keep us out of Ashley’s spare room either. Not with your knees and my shoulder. It just keeps us out for two years longer.”

“Two years is two years.”

“And two years from now, our daughter has a house. And she knows we were fair to her. I’d rather have that than the two years.”

“You’d rather,” I said. “That’s easy to say when you’re not the one who’s going to be cleaning houses on Saturdays again at sixty.”

He looked at me then the way he had looked at me in the kitchen. Not angry. Tired. “I’d clean them with you,” he said. “You know I would.”

I did know that. That was the worst part of it. Both of us were right, and both of us knew the other one was right, and neither of us could move.

Here is Rick’s side the way he would tell it, as best I can do it.

He would say he is the one who knows what it costs to be told there is nothing left for you. He would say that cost does not go away at fifty-eight.

He would say Kelsey did us a kindness by choosing the courthouse, and that we are now punishing her for it.

He would say that if she had wanted the big wedding, we would have found the money somehow, because we always do.