Three Hours for a Blouse, 

Five Minutes for a Hat

After two months of nonstop work, I finally had a few days off. Naturally, my wife dragged me downtown to Pacific Centre because there was a “huge sale” that apparently could not wait.

I was exhausted, but if I was going down, I was going down with swagger. “So what are we buying? Anything under a million bucks, it’s on me today!”

She gave me a surprised look. I almost never come along to the mall. Her car was in the shop and she’d asked me for a ride, so she’d probably figured I would drop her at the door and disappear.

My wife thinks I hate shopping. Not true. What I don’t understand is the time. If you need something, you buy it. If you don’t, you go home. A grown adult picking up thirty items, twisting in front of a mirror, and putting everything back where it came from is still one of life’s great mysteries to me, right up there with crop circles.

That day she needed fall clothes and I needed a hat. Simple, I figured. Of course, in a marriage, “simple” is usually the last word you say before the trouble starts.

She headed into Holt Renfrew. I wasn’t dragged in by the collar, but close. For the first twenty minutes, I was an excellent husband.

She pulled a blouse off the rack. “How’s this?”

“Oh, nice.”

Then another. “This one?”

“Looks good.”

Then a third. “Isn’t this color too bright?”

“Yep.”

“Your answers keep getting shorter, you know. You’re not even looking.”

I had actually been thinking about a work thing I had to deal with tomorrow. But the second I heard her, I snapped to attention and studied the blouse like it was a legal document. “No, no. It really brings out your face.”

She spun around and marched into the fitting room with three of them. A few minutes later she stepped out in the first one.

“Good?”

“Great!”

“Really?”

“Killer.”

She smiled a little and turned to the mirror. Front. Sideways. Over the shoulder. Front again. I couldn’t tell whether she was checking the blouse or reviewing her entire life.

“Doesn’t it look kind of baggy?”

I didn’t answer right away. There are questions a man must never answer on reflex.

“Hmm, not really...”

“Right?”

“Yeah.”

“Right what? Is it baggy or not?”

And here we go.

“No, not baggy at all. Not even a little. Ma’am.”

She shot me a look and went back to the mirror. “You paused before you answered. Did you know that?”

Marriage, it turns out, is an institution where you’re held accountable even for a brief silence.

She disappeared into the fitting room again and came out in the second one. “Well?”

“Way better than the last one!”

Her face froze. “I liked the last one better.”

I swallowed. “Right, right. Actually, you’re right, the first one was better. That’s the one.”

“Are you kidding me? Are you even looking?”

I tried to compare the two in my head. The problem was, I couldn’t remember what the first one looked like.

“Look, they both have their pros and cons.”

It was the most cowardly phrase I ever learned from my old office days, and also the safest place a person can stand.

My relentless wife went back in and came out in a third. “And this one?”

“Wow, crazy good! Why didn’t you wear this one first?”

She glared at me again. “This is the first one.”

I slid my eyes away and checked my watch. Fifty-seven minutes in that one store.

Even married couples have levels of courtesy. The first twenty minutes is love. Forty is consideration. Past an hour, it’s spiritual training.

In the end she bought nothing from that store.

“Let’s look around a little more.”

“A little more?”

I followed her out with a hiccup coming on. She hadn’t lost hope, and she had stamina to spare. I started to wonder what she’d been eating behind my back. Every time she spotted clothes in a new store, her eyes lit up. Every time we changed stores, I aged by the minute.

Then the mall suddenly came into focus. Why were there so many sofas and chairs? I’d never noticed. And then it hit me: they were rescue stations for husbands. I sank into one and looked around. There were plenty of guys like me, all wearing the same face. One had five shopping bags at his feet and was sighing at nothing, all desire for life long gone. Across from him sat a man muttering to himself, half out of his mind. Two seats down, an older gentleman was staring at his phone. The screen was off.

Around the two-and-a-half-hour mark, I carefully ventured, “At this point, couldn’t we just buy something? Anything?”

“You think I’m playing here? I’m trying to find the right one.”

“I mean, if something looks kind of right...”

“I’m looking for the one that looks kind of right!”

By the three-hour mark, we were in the last store, Club Monaco. She held up a piece. “How’s this?”

By then every piece of clothing in the world looked identical to me. “Good.”

“Good? Nothing you call ‘good’ has ever been good.”

“What do you want from me?”

She hung it back up and glanced over her shoulder, wistful. “Did you really look at it?”

“I looked.”

“What color was it?”

“Beige.”

“It was gray.”

“Grayish beige.”

“There’s no such color.”

Then she stopped dead and snapped at me. Honestly, I got it. She was worn out too. “If you don’t want to buy me clothes, just say so. Why do you keep sighing?”

“When did I sigh?”

“You’ve been doing it all afternoon.”

“It’s called breathing.”

“Why do you have to breathe so rudely?”

After that, we didn’t look at each other or say a word. Cold war. And then, walking past a men’s accessories shop, I spotted a baseball cap that looked good. I went in, picked it up, tried it on. I liked what I saw in the mirror. I went straight to the register.

“I’ll take this.”

My wife, who had followed me in, was stunned. “That’s it? You’re not going to look at anything else?”

“What else is there to look at?”

“There are other colors. Other styles.”

“If you like it, you buy it,” I said flatly. “What’s so hard about shopping?”

I expected a comeback. Instead she went quiet, a little deflated. And I thought: oh no.

When a supersonic bullet hits you, you hear the shot only after you’ve gone down. The bullet outruns its own sound. Words work the same way. We say something without thinking, and only later do we hear it, and regret it. I hadn’t meant it as a dig. But that’s exactly what it was. I couldn’t stop thinking about her awkward face and her silence. Would I get through dinner tonight? I should have just played it cool and joked around, like always.

She had spent three hours and bought nothing. I had spent five minutes and bought a hat. Walking to the parking lot, we were stiff and silent again. Truthfully, I wasn’t in a great mood either. I was the one who’d been dragged around for three hours until my jaw hurt, and somehow I felt like the guilty one. Apologizing felt unfair, but just going home like this felt like the whole day was ruined. I think most men know that feeling. I pulled my new cap down low as I walked.

We could see our car up ahead when she said, “Wait.”

I braced myself. Round one. Then, of course, the hiccups came back.

But she stepped behind me and touched my cap, gently. She peeled off the price tag that was still stuck to it. “Were you really going to walk around with this on?” Then she came around to the front and adjusted the brim. “But you know what? This one, you picked well.”

“...?”

“You must be hungry.”

Her soft voice was nothing like what I’d expected, and something in my chest swelled.

“Yeah, I’m starving.” (And just like that, I switched to baby mode.)

“Of course you are. I dragged you around for three hours. There’s a nice Italian place on East 6th. Poor thing, you earned it. Let’s get something good tonight.”

“Can we get it to go? I’m so wiped, I just want to eat at home.”

“Aww, you poor baby. I could give your bottom a little pat.”

Like always, we were laughing and joking again as if nothing had happened. The clothes my wife spent three hours picking never made it home. The hat I picked in five minutes did.

But on the drive she straightened that hat twice more. Once at a red light, and once more when she got back into the car holding our dinner.

To this day I don’t understand how she can spend three hours choosing a single blouse. And I’m pretty sure she’ll never understand how I buy a hat in five minutes.

Looking back, we’ve gone through most of our marriage like this, not quite understanding each other. Sometimes we walk at different speeds. Sometimes we stop at the strangest places, in opposite directions. Sometimes one of us got angry, convinced the other wasn’t being considerate. And still, in the end, we come home laughing. Maybe that’s just what marriage is. One of us picks the hat, and the other, whether either of us notices or not, fixes it every time it goes crooked.

The older I get, the more I think a married couple is like two trees. Above ground, they look like two separate trees. But deep underground, where nobody can see, the roots are tangled up tight, holding each other up.

So what if we still bicker over small stuff? After everything we’ve walked through together, all those years of lowering ourselves to lift the other up and being each other’s support, what is there to regret?

I’m parked at the curb now, looking in the rearview mirror. She’s coming down the street with the food bag held to her chest, smiling. Behind her, the evening sky is going gold over downtown, and even the name on the sign, Giusti, sounds sweet.

© 2026. Gun Choi. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, design imitation, or concept reproduction is strictly prohibited.

 The Old Table

Not long after we got married, we bought a table. Or really, we picked the thing that looked most like a table among the things we could afford. The place had a lot of empty space in it, and our bank account had more. At the furniture store, my wife ran her palm across the surface and asked, "Not bad, right?"

I checked the price tag first. $199.

"Looks great to me."

Back then, our taste and our budget were pretty much the same thing.

It was dark brown, with a wood-grain pattern. I wanted to believe it was real wood, but a few years later a corner chipped and underneath was pressed sawdust. Still, it was heavy, it seated four, and it fit our kitchen exactly. At the time, that was plenty.

For the first few years, that table did more than hold meals. We spread out tax forms on it and punched numbers into a calculator. I took apart a broken toaster on it and ended up breaking it worse. My wife sewed on buttons there, and I sorted bills by date. Before summer vacations we'd unfold a map and circle places much too far away for us to go. And there were all those Sunday mornings when we got up late and did nothing but drink coffee. Looking back, those were the real luxury.

The marks piled up. There's a faint ring from a hot pot set down without a trivet, a stain from a tipped wine glass, and a deep scratch that we still blame on each other.

"You did that."

"Why would I scratch the table?"

"You break things very creatively."

The longer you're married, the more important it gets to keep a suspect around than to find out the truth. The scratch is still there, and the culprit is still at large.

Meanwhile, everything else in the house got replaced. The couch, the bed, the TV. The fridge, twice. Only the table stayed. We talked about replacing it a few times. We looked at pictures online. We went back to the store and ran our hands over the smooth tops. Once I had my card halfway out of my wallet. But every time, we went home and the idea just fizzled. The new ones were nicer, sure. They just didn't feel like ours. Ask me why and I couldn't tell you.

Last winter, I think it was, on a night when the snow was coming down hard, my wife set a pot of soup in the middle of the table. It was just the two of us, and the other two seats were empty. When we were young, I used to complain that four seats was too small. At some point it had become far too big for two people. I picked up my spoon and my eyes landed on the tabletop. All those marks that would've upset me on a new table looked, that night, strangely welcome.

"Somebody's gotten old," my wife said, blowing on her soup.

"Handsomely, I'd say."

"I meant the table."

"So did I."

We both laughed. It wasn't even funny, and we laughed for a long time.

People ask now and then why we hang on to something so beat up. Honestly, we're not sentimental about things. We throw out what we don't use. But there are some days this table won't let go of. The first time we had guests, our friends Jenny and David came up from San Diego. My wife had made shepherd's pie, Caesar salad, and cream pasta, and there was no way it was all going to fit on the table in proper dishes. She just set the pots down in the middle and said, "Tonight, this is the buffet," grinning like she'd planned it all along. The day I lost my job, neither of us ate much. We just sat there, and she reached over and took my hand without a word. Days like that are stacked up in that table. That's why I can't throw it out.

A few weeks ago my wife asked again. "Should we finally replace it?"

One leg wobbles now, and the top doesn't shine anymore, even when I wipe it down. We can afford a new table. We're not the couple checking the price tag first anymore. But what came out of my mouth was, "Let's keep it a little longer."

"Since when are you sentimental?"

"I'm not. I just don't want to assemble a new one."

That was true, too. Just not all of it.

That night we sat across from each other and ate, like always. Under the table, my foot bumped hers. When we were young, that would've been footsie. Now neither of us moved. Two plates of pasta, two glasses of water, and the table holding them up, not moving either. None of the three of us said a word.

Someday the table will leave our house, too. It's furniture, after all. But until then, I don't mind getting old a little longer next to it. It got old before we did, and it's still holding up pretty well.

© 2026. Gun Choi. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, design imitation, or concept reproduction is strictly prohibited.