Through Martha's discerning eyes the entire scene came attached with price tags. With a considerable amount taken off the final sum for hosting it within a family friend's backyard garden, she imagined the Larson-Wagner wedding costing a respectable four hundred dollars. Her only real complaint was that greater expense hadn't been taken with the band who currently sat butchering a Glenn Miller number as admittedly off-tempo couples danced along. She entertained doubts that a even a more talented group could throw them a rhythmic lifeline.
Stationed by the gifts as they were, Martha got the vague impression her husband was being relied upon to keep any neighbor children from walking off with them. What use a child had for a standing mixer, she couldn't say, but mental notes were made to leave out the catalog with a few choice items among the newlywed's haul circled in red. She'd take her mixer in cerulean blue, please and thank you.
"Distateful." Martha sneered at the presumptuous offering of a bib and booties. She got the joke. The old saying went that first comes love, then comes marriage, and finally the baby in the baby carriage; it was only the natural order of things. What they appeared to have overlooked were implications that Rosemary Larson, nee Wagner, may have been with child at the time of her nuptials. The bulk of her disapproving expression promptly hid itself behind the wide rim of her cocktail glass. "I hope they remember to thank whoever gave it for starting the rumor mill."
Passive Aggression was not, in fact, an invited guest. It was entirely possible that Martha was the only person to notice and potentially make a fuss about it, but she needed something to complain about that didn't go by the name of Everett. Drink exhausted, a new score singing its beginning notes, she drawled under her breath, "We should probably make a show of it and join them at some point."