THE RIGHT THING: LOOKING A GIFT DINNER IN THE MOUTH

The steak dinner was superb. There were no complaints about the food, the service or the company.

My reader was treating her daughter and son-in-law to a fancy meal, and everything went off without a hitch ... until the bill came. "I just glanced at the bill," my reader recalls, "and ran my eyes down it to make sure it was accurate before I gave the waitress my credit card."

That's when her son-in-law "barked softly," as she puts it.

"You are not supposed to check the bill, mom," he said. "It's unethical."

Having heard assorted horror stories about servers adding extra items to bills or getting the math wrong, my reader says, she usually double-checks her bill.

"Maybe guys find it awkward," she speculates.

She's noticed that, when her son-in-law is buying, he doesn't check the bill, no matter how many people are in the dinner party.

"He whips out his credit card," she says, "and gives it to the server right away without looking."

Figuring that she works hard for every dollar she earns, my reader believes that she should be able to check her restaurant bills for accuracy without having her ethics challenged.

"I would like to be able to tell my son-in-law that it is OK," she says, "that it is ethical and downright smart to check the bill, even briefly, for accuracy."

Of course it's OK to check your dinner bill when it comes. It's smart to make sure everything's correct, so that you don't have to deal with any problems later in the process.

What's baffling is why the son-in-law would even raise this as an ethical issue. Even if this is something that he happens not to do himself, what could possibly make him question his mother-in-law's ethics -- especially since she is, after all, treating him to dinner?

Aha! It's something that he thinks she shouldn't do because he doesn't. That's the issue. He finds her examination of the bill embarrassing -- perhaps he thinks it makes them look cheap or implies that they don't trust the waitress -- but, instead of telling her that, he elevates the behavior he finds disagreeable to an ethical breach.

There's a far cry between something that we merely don't like and something that's unethical. Sometimes the stuff we don't like is simply stuff we don't like. Not everyone can or should be expected to behave the same way that we behave.

My glib advice to my reader was that, the next time her son-in-law raises such an issue, she should hand over the bill to him and let him pay. If he's so troubled by her sensible behavior, let him do it his way.

She doesn't want to cause any unnecessary tension among the three of them, however -- "I love them too much," she says -- so my reader won't take that step.

The right thing for my reader to do, then, is to continue to discreetly check her restaurant bills, if that practice gives her comfort. And the right thing for her son-in-law to do, after he's finished his 28-ounce, prime Porterhouse steak, when the check arrives and his mother-in-law dons her reading glasses to do a quick double-check of the bill, is to lean forward and say, "Thanks, mom, for the terrific meal."

c.2008 The New York Times Syndicate (Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate)