He said: handle it how?
I said: I have something in mind.
He said: Kelsey is not going to respond well to being confronted.
I said: I’m not confronting her.
He said: what are you doing?
I said: giving her a wedding gift.
I want to tell you about the gift.
Not only what it was, but why it was that, because the why is the whole of it.
I could have sent her a bill.
I spoke with a contractor about restoring the lawn and replacing the garden. The numbers were what they were, not dramatic, but real: professional repair of damaged grass, and the cost of finding and planting the varieties Frances had grown, some of which lived only at specialty nurseries.
I could have billed her.
I could have sent the invoice, demanded payment, pulled in Thomas and his parents, and turned it into a family fight with numbers attached.
I chose not to.
Not because I could not afford the costs, which I could, and not because I was absorbing them graciously, which I was not.
Because I understood something about Kelsey that a bill would not touch.
A bill would be about money.
Kelsey understood money as an abstraction, because money, for Kelsey, had always been there when she needed it. Her parents had provided. Thomas had often covered things. The world had generally arranged itself around her needs.
A bill would be something she paid or did not pay. It would end in one of those two directions and produce no particular understanding of what she had done.
I wanted her to understand what she had done.
I spent a week gathering the pieces of the gift.
The box was a nice one, from a stationery shop, the kind that closes with a ribbon.
Inside it, I placed the following.
