Page 11 of Fathers of the Bride

“You know better than that. We need to give the two of them something. Plus, an engagement present and something for just Kelly.”

“Separately,” he said.

“Really?”

“Do you want to go gift shopping with me?” he asked, waving a red cape in front of a bull.

“No, of course not. We’ll do the gifts separately.”

“We’ll need limits.”

“We have rules.”

Ignoring me, he said, “How much do you plan to spend on each gift?”

I simply frowned at him and asked, “Does that really matter?”

“It wouldn’t do for one of us to spend a fortune on a gift and make the other look bad.”

I’m sure he was referring to me, so I countered with, “You know Kelly doesn’t care about material things.”

“We don’t know that for sure. She’s never gotten married before. And Avery might care and if he cares she’ll care.”

“That sounds sexist,” I pointed out.

“It’s not. If she cared, I would think Avery would care. They’re getting married, theyshouldcare what the other wants.”

“Is that a dig?” I asked. It felt like a dig.

“No, not at all,” he said. “You know, I’m happy to shop for the gifts together. If that’s what you want.”

“Fine, we’ll do it together then,” I said, tersely.

“Well not if you don’t want to.”

“No, no, we should do it together. It makes sense,” I insisted. “I certainly don’t want calls from you saying you’ve just spent five hundred dollars on a gift and then feeling like I have to spend as close to five hundred dollars as I can without going over and then when I inevitably do go over waiting for you to bitch me out.”

“I wouldn’t bitch you out for a few dollars here or there. I’m not like that.”

He wasn’t but I sniffed at him anyway.

“The problem is defining what a few dollars is and is not,” I pointed out. “Twenty-five dollars, fifty, two hundred, five—?”

“All right. If you want to do the gifting together, we’ll do it together.”

“I didn’t say Iwantedto, I said it would makesense.”

“We’ll do it whichever you want,” he said, exasperated.

“I said we’d do it together. How difficult does this have to be?”

We sat there silent again, each of us looking off in a different direction as though something truly interesting was going on in another part of the coffee shop. It wasn’t.

Finally, I said, “I suppose it’s good we’re talking.”

“We’re at least saving money,” he acknowledged. Glancing at his phone he added, “Almost ten minutes. What is that in legalese? Two hundred dollars?”

That sounded like blame. It wasn’t my fault we’d spent so much money on lawyers. He was the one—