“Of course she does. I’m not saying…” She paused, regrouped. “What I mean is, this is a certain kind of event. Our friends. Robert’s business associates. There are standards people expect.”
“What kind of standards?”
“Oh, you know.” She waved one perfectly manicured hand. “The venue. The catering. The wine selection. It’s a whole production. Your mother shouldn’t have to worry about those details.”
“My mother has been planning events at her church for fifteen years. I think she can handle details.”
Constance smiled again, thinner now.
“I’m sure she can. For church events.”
I understood then that she was not worried about my mother’s competence. She was worried about my mother’s taste, my mother’s class markers, my mother’s existence as evidence of the world I had come from. I told David about that conversation later that night. He sighed and rubbed his forehead.
“She’s trying to help.”
“She’s trying to keep my mother out of the way.”
“That’s not…” He stopped, then started over. “Look, my mom has a lot on her plate right now. The anniversary party she’s planning for next year, the charity gala, all of it. She’s stressed. She probably didn’t phrase it well.”
“How should she have phrased it?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
Then he pulled me closer.
“Can we please just get through the wedding without turning everything into a battle?”
I let him hold me, and I said nothing else, but I did not forget. The wedding itself was beautiful. Even I had to admit that Constance had won most of the battles and the result was elegant and tasteful and looked like it belonged in a magazine spread. My mother wore a navy blue dress she had altered three separate times to make it fit exactly right. She sat in the front row with her hands folded in her lap and watched me walk down the aisle. She didn’t cry. My mother never cried in public. But when I stopped to kiss her before taking David’s hand, she whispered, “You look like your father today.” It was the most beautiful thing she could have said to me. The reception was at a country club, not Constance and Robert’s country club, the more exclusive one with the two-year waiting list and the whispered membership fees, but still a nice one. The food was excellent. The band was good. I danced with David, then with Robert, then with my mother, who moved stiffly because she had never been much of a dancer but refused to sit out the mother-daughter song. At one point during the reception, I found myself standing at the bar next to one of Robert’s business associates, an older man with a reddened nose and the soft overfed look of someone who had been working on his third drink since cocktail hour. He introduced himself as Frank something. I didn’t catch the last name. He asked how I was enjoying the wedding.
“It’s wonderful,” I said. “Constance really outdid herself.”
He raised his glass toward the room.
“From what I hear, she had quite the partner in crime. David’s business must be doing well, huh? All this can’t have been cheap.”
I laughed politely, unsure what exactly he meant. I knew David’s business was doing well, at least as far as he told me. He had started his own commercial real estate firm three years before we met, and it had grown steadily. We weren’t wildly rich, but we were comfortable. I assumed his parents were helping with the wedding, but we had never talked about specifics. That was probably something we should have talked about. I made a mental note to ask later.
“Must be nice,” Frank continued, “having a wife who understands hard work. Constance told me about your mother. Worked her way up from nothing, right? That’s the American dream.”
“Something like that.”
“Robert always says that’s what this country needs more of. People who earn it. Not like these kids today, all expecting handouts.”
He drained his drink and added, as if it was somehow a kindness, “No offense to your generation.”
“None taken.”
I slipped away from him and found David on the patio with some college friends, laughing, his tie loosened, his hair starting to fall out of the careful shape he’d put it in that morning. He looked happy. Relaxed. Like a man who had never had to explain anything to anyone. I decided the money conversation could wait until after the honeymoon. We bought a house six months after the wedding, a three-bedroom colonial in a neighborhood close enough to David’s parents to make them happy but far enough to feel like our own. I liked it. It had good bones, my mother said when she visited, which was her way of saying it needed work but was worth the effort. When we sat down to talk finances, David suggested he handle the mortgage and the major accounts.
“It’s easier this way. My income fluctuates with the deals.”
I’d keep my own account for daily expenses, groceries, smaller things. We would keep a joint account for shared costs, and I would transfer a set amount each month. The rest he would manage. It made sense at the time. He was the one who understood investments and cash flow and all the things they never taught in nonprofit work. I trusted him. I didn’t ask to see statements. I didn’t check balances. I thought that was what trust was. Later I would understand that there is a difference between trust and deliberate blindness, but by then the damage was already done. David’s business grew. I was promoted at the nonprofit. We talked about starting a family in a year or two, once we’d settled into the house. The first real crack came at Thanksgiving. We hosted for the first time, our first holiday as a married couple. I had been cooking for days, trying to replicate the dishes my mother used to make when I was growing up. Not Polish dishes, not for Thanksgiving, but the American standards. Turkey. Stuffing. Green bean casserole. My mother was coming, and so were Constance and Robert. David’s younger sister had been supposed to fly in from Seattle but canceled at the last minute with some illness, so it was just the five of us. My mother arrived early to help. She wore a simple brown dress, her sensible flats, and her good pearl earrings, the ones she had bought herself for her fiftieth birthday. She brought a pie from scratch even though I told her not to bring anything.
“Your kitchen is warm,” she said after kissing my cheek. “That’s good. A kitchen should be warm.”
Constance and Robert arrived exactly on time, which somehow felt like a criticism. They brought an expensive bottle of wine, a fact Robert made sure to mention, and flowers in a vase that probably cost more than my mother’s pearl earrings. Constance air kissed me, then turned toward my mother.
“Marta. How nice to see you again.”
“Constance.”
My mother was not an air-kissing type.
“What a lovely dress,” Constance said. “Very practical.”
My mother looked down at herself.
“Thank you. It has pockets.”
