Anna read the answer in Casey’s face and in Unu’s silence. Joseph squinted at Unu and exhaled audibly.
“Kathryn,” Anna said, her voice tinged lightly with chiding, “that’s personal—”
Somehow, Chul’s mother’s sympathy made Casey feel worse. Tina bit her lip.
Joseph looked at Unu again. He seemed like a kindhearted child. The divorce was a strike against him, but he wanted to know too if Unu had any intention of marrying Casey. A divorced Korean boy from a nice family was still better than an American boy from Princeton who had too much arrogance. Unu and Casey were living together and no doubt sharing a bed. How could he take possession of her body and not want to care for her? It was a man’s duty to protect the woman he loved. Those were the old ways, but they were the right ones. It occurred to him that if Casey were dating a man who wasn’t going to marry her, then she was even crazier than he thought.
Kathryn had put down her chopsticks, unfazed by her mother’s comment. She stared at the bride’s older sister, but Casey merely picked up her red porcelain teacup and took a sip. Virginia, who’d done some media training, had once told Casey, “You don’t have to answer every question.”
“The presents,” Tina said spontaneously. “We should give out the presents.”
Leah nodded and fetched the parcels beside her chair. Glad to get up from her seat, Casey put a wrapped present in front of everyone in Chul’s family.
“Oh, this was so unnecessary,” Anna said. Then she pulled out her set of presents and Chul passed those out. Everyone opened their boxes.
Anna received a gold-and-diamond necklace-and-bracelet set, and the sisters each received gold-and-diamond earrings. The father was given a Burberry raincoat, and Chul got his Cartier watch. The brothers-in-law got V-neck cashmere sweaters from Scotland and scarves. The little boys received two-hundred-fifty-dollar savings bonds. Leah had spent six thousand dollars on the gifts. She’d given Joseph the receipts, and he’d never said anything about the expense. This money had come out of their retirement savings. Engagements could be broken off if inferior presents were given, and there were instances where daughters-in-law were beaten or resented from the memory of a bad gift. This was what Leah had wanted to avoid. For months, she’d worried herself about what to give Chul’s family—how to give the most precious, luxurious thing that would make them welcome Tina.
Chul’s family had given Joseph a black-and-white YSL logo necktie and a pair of electroplated silver cuff links. Leah received a red wool muffler, and so did Casey. Tina received an old-fashioned jade brooch in a gold frame. Casey couldn’t help but tote up the cost in her head. Five hundred dollars? The gifts had all come from Macy’s.
“It’s beautiful,” Casey exclaimed. She folded the oblong scarf in half, then draped it across her neck, pushing the ends through the folded loop she’d made to create what Sabine called the aviator knot.
“That color looks great on you,” Anna said, trying to sound happy.
The difference in the gifts was too severe to ignore. Either the Hans had overdone it or the Baeks had done too little. It was too late. Rose, the youngest, tried to be nice about it, removing the pearls from her ears to put on the eighteen-karat-gold earrings in the shape of dogwood flowers that Leah had chosen so carefully. The earrings had cost seven hundred dollars at wholesale price. The lady who’d sold them to Leah was a jeweler in her geh, and she’d said those earrings were made in the same workshop in Florence that made jewelry for Tiffany’s. They weren’t knockoffs, she’d said; they were Tiffany earrings without the hallmarks or blue boxes. Leah had never given her own daughters such costly presents.
Taking Rose’s example, Anna clasped the necklace around her neck. It looked beautiful on her.
“You are too much,” she said to Leah. Her face was split in its expression—the mouth was smiling, but her brow wrinkled in a frown. “Too generous. Too, too much. So Korean to give such extravagant things. It is really so gorgeous, but—” Anna guessed correctly that her necklace-and-bracelet set had cost nearly as much as her son’s watch.
Leah stroked her scarf. It was a nice lambswool. “It will be good and warm for the winter. Thank you so much,” she said. It was better this way. Yesu Christo had said it was more blessed to give than to receive. Her father had taught her to take on the suffering, to donate her whole self to the interests of others, to give everything up because God would take care of your every need.