Two Mothers, One Wedding
1227 Words
The word "fiancé" still felt like someone else's word. I kept trying it on — in texts to my sister, in the checkout line at the grocery store when the cashier asked if I'd found everything I was looking for, and I wanted to say no but also yes and also I'm engaged now which seemed relevant to something. Ethan didn't notice. He was on his laptop, scrolling through supplier invoices, the screen casting a pale blue light across the kitchen table.
"Did you find a venue?" he asked. Not looking up.
"I narrowed it down to three."
"Great. Which one do you like?"
I liked the one with the garden. It had a brick wall covered in ivy and string lights already hung from the rafters, which saved roughly four hundred dollars in the "ambiance" category, according to my spreadsheet. I had a spreadsheet. Ethan did not know I had a spreadsheet.
"The one with the ivy," I said.
"Perfect."
He said it like I'd asked him whether we needed milk. One word, no follow-up, back to the invoices. I looked at the spreadsheet on my phone — seven tabs open, three color palettes, a guest list draft, and a chair rental calculator that had made me feel things I didn't think furniture could make me feel. Ethan had contributed one opinion in two weeks of engagement: "Whatever you want."
It sounded like a gift.
---
My mom arrived first. She came through the door with a casserole dish in one hand and a legal pad in the other, which was her version of arriving empty-handed.
"You look thin," she said, which was her version of hello.
"I'm not thin."
"You're thinner than last month." She set the casserole on the counter and started opening cabinets, checking our stock. "Do you even own vegetables?"
Ethan's mom arrived twelve minutes later with a three-ring binder. An actual binder. It had tabs and dividers and a cover page that said "Gallagher Wedding" in a font that suggested someone had spent more time on the cover page than I had spent on my entire college thesis.
"Linda!" Ethan's mom hugged me with the full-body enthusiasm of a woman who had been waiting for this moment since her son was born. She smelled like Chanel and baked goods. "Let me show you what I've been working on."
She opened the binder. There were color swatches. There were fabric samples. There was a seating chart for a reception hall I had never heard of.
"I was thinking St. Andrew's," she said. "We had my cousin Rebecca's reception there. Beautiful space. The pulpit area can be repurposed for the head table."
"That's a church," my mom said from the kitchen, where she was putting my vegetables away.
"It's nondenominational now," Ethan's mom said. "Very inclusive."
"How much?"
"The venue fee is fifteen hundred. But that includes the—"
"** hundred for a church."
"Mom." I said it with a smile. My "let's not" smile. The one I'd been perfecting since I was fourteen and my parents divorced and I learned that the fastest way to end an argument was to pretend it wasn't happening.
"I'm just asking." My mom held up both hands. "Information gathering. That's all."
Ethan's mom flipped to another tab in the binder. "For flowers, I was thinking hydrangeas. White and pale green. Very elegant."
"Hydrangeas are twelve dollars a stem," my mom said.
"Who orders by the stem? You order in bulk."
"In bulk, then. How many? What's the total?"
Ethan looked at me from the couch. He had his phone out. I couldn't tell if he was checking something or pretending to check something. He gave me a small nod that I think was supposed to mean "you're doing great." I smiled back. The smile did most of the work.
---
The hydrangea debate lasted twenty minutes. It touched on seasonality, import costs, Ethan's mom's cousin who had done her own centerpieces in 1994 ("They were beautiful, Linda, you should have seen them"), and the relative merits of mason jars versus actual vases. My mom took notes on her legal pad. Ethan's mom rearranged the binder tabs. I said "That could work" four times and "We'll figure it out" twice. Ethan said nothing.
The conversation drifted to the guest list. Ethan's mom had forty-seven names on a pre-drafted list. My mom asked if that included children. Ethan's mom said of course it included children, what kind of wedding doesn't include children. My mom said it depended on the budget. Ethan's mom said budgets were flexible. My mom said they weren't.
I said, "Let's come back to the guest list."
The temperature changed when we got to money. Not the weather — the windows were open and the summer air was doing its thing — but the space between the two women at my kitchen table, which had been filling up with unspoken things for the better part of an hour.
"In my day," Ethan's mom said, smooth as butter, "the bride's family covered the reception."
My mom set down her pen.
"In my day," she said, "the bride decided."
A beat. Not long. Three seconds, maybe four. Ethan's mom smiled — a real smile, not a sharp one. My mom smiled back — a real smile, not a conceding one. Both of them were being perfectly polite. The politeness was the problem.
"We'll figure it out," I said.
My mom looked at me. Just for a second. Something moved behind her eyes — not anger, something softer. Like a question she wasn't going to ask because she already knew the answer.
"We will," she said.
Ethan's mom reached across the table and squeezed my hand. "Whatever works for you two. That's all that matters."
I believed her. I also believed my mom. They were both right. They were both saying the same thing in different languages, and I was the only one who spoke both.
---
After they left, I cleaned up. My mom had brought a casserole — chicken and rice, which was her love language — and Ethan's mom had left the binder on the coffee table, open to the seating chart. I closed the binder. I put the casserole in the fridge.
Ethan was on the couch, phone in his hand, screen face-up on the cushion beside him. He'd started leaving it face-up sometime in the last week. I didn't know when exactly.
"That went well," he said.
"Yeah." I sat next to him. "I think so."
"Your mom had some good points. About the budget."
"She always does."
He put his arm around me. The apartment was quiet. The binder sat on the coffee table like a small monument to other people's plans. I leaned into him and thought about the ivy wall and the string lights and the garden venue I hadn't told anyone about yet, because nobody had asked.
My phone buzzed. A text from my mom.
*Are you happy?*
I typed back: *I'm great.*
Sent it. Put the phone down. Picked up the binder and opened it to the color swatches. White and pale green. The hydrangeas were pretty. I'd give her the hydrangeas.
The casserole dish was still on the counter, rinsed and empty. Through the window, the sprinklers were running somewhere. Summer. Everything was fine.
- Writer
