My mother didn’t say anything for a long time.
“I told her you agreed,” she said finally.
“I know.”
“I thought — I thought you’d come around to it. That once it was settled, once Elise was excited, you wouldn’t want to take it away from her.”
I let that sit for a moment. “That’s not consent,” I said. “That’s a plan for getting me to go along with something you’d already done.”
Another silence.
“I need to think,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be here when you’re ready.”
## The Budget Conversation
Here is where things got, in certain ways, practically complicated.
Elise had been planning on a dress budget of fifteen hundred dollars. She had applied some of that toward alterations already — Rosa’s consultation fee and the partial work. My mother had, in the version of the story Elise had been given, committed to contributing to the alteration cost as a wedding gift. All of this was built on a foundation that I had never actually agreed to.
With ten weeks until the wedding — I found out in April, the wedding was in late June — Elise needed a dress. Not someday. Soon.
My mother called me three days after our conversation. She’d clearly been thinking.
“I need to fix this,” she said. “What would that look like.”
“It starts with Elise,” I said. “I need to talk to her. Not you as a go-between. Her and me.”
“She knows.”
“I know she knows. I want to talk to her.”