“Or how one visit can turn a day off into a disaster”
“If I’m not good enough for you, then take your precious little son back! Good riddance! Go take care of him yourselves, poor little thing!”
Take your dear son back if I’m so awful! And good riddance to you—go on, keep babying him, poor little thing.
“Pasha, how much longer am I supposed to stand outside your door? Are you going to open the door for me or not?!” Inga Valeryevna asked her son over the phone in an outraged voice. “I’ve been ringing your doorbell for ten minutes, and no one is opening! What is this?”
“Hello to you too, Mom,” Pavel answered into the phone. “What are you doing outside our door? No one’s home right now! I left on some errands, and Nastya spent the night at her friend’s place. And why didn’t you warn us you were coming today?”
“Well, that’s just wonderful!” the woman grew even angrier. “And what do you expect me to do now? How long am I supposed to wait here?”
“I won’t be free for another couple of hours, and Nastya—I don’t know exactly—she was planning to come home only in the evening. So at least a couple of hours,” her son “delighted” her. “Go somewhere, sit in a café, wait. There’s a decent café near our building. Wait for me there.”
“Listen, I am not going to wait for anyone! Call your wife and tell her to run home quickly! Does her friend live far away?”
“Far!” Pasha replied. “And I doubt she’ll drop everything and rush home right now, Mom. You should warn people in advance when you’re coming! What kind of habit is this—quietly deciding something and showing up without saying a word? And this is far from the first time!”
“Don’t start teaching me, Pasha, what I should and shouldn’t do! I can figure that out perfectly well without you. Now call your Nastya. I’m not interested in her friends. Tell her to go home and open the door for me. I didn’t spend seven hours on a train just to stand half the day outside your door!”
“Yeeah,” Pavel drawled. “I’ll call her, of course, but I’m not promising anything.”
“Call her. I’m waiting. Call me back and tell me how much longer I have to sit here!” Inga Valeryevna said and hung up.
“This is exactly what I needed…” Pasha muttered in annoyance after his mother ended the call. “Damn it, the day started so well, and then she shows up! What kind of person is she? She doesn’t understand anything!”
Pasha got into his car and called his wife.
“Nastyona, hi! Sorry, I didn’t want to bother you, but I have a question: how much longer will you be at Natasha’s?”
“Hi,” Nastya answered sleepily. “What happened?”
“Are you two still sleeping or something?”
“Yeah. We only went to bed toward morning. We spent half the night talking and sitting around. So what do you need?” Nastya asked again and yawned.
“Mom,” the man said quietly.
“I don’t understand. What about Mom?”
“My mom is standing outside our door! She arrived recently and is trying to get into our apartment!”
“Again?” Nastya said unhappily. “Why can’t she stay at home? And why didn’t she say in advance that she was coming?”
“Could you please not ask me those questions? I asked her the same thing!”
“So what do you want from me? For me to get up right now and go open the door for her? Where are you?”
“I’m out running errands. I’ll only be able to get home in at least a couple of hours. That’s why I called you.”
“No! I’m not going anywhere! I want to sleep! It’s my day off today, and I promised Natasha we’d spend the whole day together. So your mother can wait for you somewhere in a café. And by the way, is she staying with us long?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t ask. As usual, probably until tomorrow evening. She has cats at home that need feeding.”
“Great, then. You and your mother can do whatever you want. I’ll stay at Natasha’s until tomorrow. I don’t even want to cross paths with her. Otherwise her eternal dissatisfied song will start again: this is wrong, that is wrong. That’s it, count me out.”
“Come on, Nastyona, please! Otherwise she’ll eat me alive. Go home, open the apartment for her. It’s not that far from Natasha’s anyway, and afterward you can ask anything from me. I swear!”
“Aaah!” Nastya groaned quietly. “Why is it always like this? Why do I have to sit with your mother?”
“So you’ll go and open the apartment for her?”
“What do I get for it?”
“Anything you ask for! I’ll do anything!”
“Fine,” his wife said. “Remember those boots I liked?”
“The ones that cost almost fifty thousand? Those boots?” Pasha was horrified.
“Exactly. So tomorrow we’re going, and you’re buying me those boots.”
“But, Nastyona…”
“You said yourself I could ask for anything. And I’m still being merciful. But I can also not go anywhere at all. The choice is yours.”
“Fine! I agree,” Pasha surrendered. “Just… don’t fight there. Please.”
“That doesn’t depend on me, Pash. You know that perfectly well.”
The spouses talked for a few more minutes, and Nastya, sleepy and annoyed, got out of bed. She warned her friend that she had to go home, and that if possible, she would come back in an hour or maybe a little later.
It took the woman about forty minutes to get home. If it hadn’t been for traffic, of course, she would have arrived much sooner.
She drove up to the café near their building and went inside, since her husband had said his mother might be there. Inga Valeryevna was not in the café, so Anastasia headed home.
When she reached her floor, she found her mother-in-law sitting on the stairs on some kind of rag she had laid down.
“Hello, Inga Valeryevna,” Nastya began kindly. “You should have warned us you were coming. We would have been home. It’s just my day off, and Pashka is running errands…”
“Don’t justify yourself to me, dear. I can come when I need to and when it’s convenient for me, and I don’t intend to report to you. Come on, open the apartment. I’m already tired of guarding you here on the stairs.”
“Can’t you speak a little more simply? Do you always have to show your arrogance?” Anastasia suddenly snapped. “Did I drive across half the city just to listen to more nasty things from you again?”
“Go ahead, keep whining at me. You live in my son’s apartment, and you’re going to bare your little teeth at me? I’ll break them off quickly.”
At that moment Nastya opened the apartment, and her mother-in-law tried to fly inside faster than the daughter-in-law.
“Stop!” Nastya stopped her. “Repeat that. Whose apartment am I living in? And what were you planning to do to my teeth?”
“Take your hand off the door and let me pass!”
She grabbed Nastya by the arm, pushed her aside, and went into the apartment.
Nastya froze in shock. But that state quickly vanished. She followed her inside and stopped her mother-in-law before she could take off her coat and shoes.
“I said repeat what you said about the apartment and my teeth!”
“What, do you have hearing problems?” Inga Valeryevna smirked. “That’s not something you should come to me with. You need specialists for that.”
“I don’t understand something. What exactly did I do to you just now? Why do you allow yourself to speak to me like that? You didn’t come to your own home. You came to visit me, so be kind enough to behave accordingly. Otherwise you may start having problems not only with your hearing. Don’t provoke me. I’m warning you nicely right now. You’d better not make me angry.”
“Oh, where should I hide? I’m so scared of you, I don’t even know where to run! And I came to my son’s home, which means it’s the same as coming to my own home. You’re nobody here, and your name is nothing! You trapped my son, dragged him away from his mother, and now you’re still dissatisfied with something! Better shut your mouth and don’t push me into sin!”
“Take your little son back if I’m so bad, and good riddance to you. Keep babying him! And I’m not going to shut my mouth, but you should shut yours and stop provoking me. Otherwise I’ll throw you out the door right now and go back where I came from!”
“Yeah, try it!” Inga Valeryevna said in a deliberately provocative voice. “I’ll throw you out of here myself!”
Nastya could barely control herself. She wanted to smack that vile woman so badly that she didn’t know what to do with herself to avoid carrying it out. But after those words from her mother-in-law, all her patience simply evaporated.
Anastasia grabbed her mother-in-law by the collar, opened the door, and forcefully threw her out onto the landing.
Inga Valeryevna lost her balance and sprawled right in front of the neighbor’s door. Her bag and the rag she had been sitting on flew out after her.
Nastya simply closed the door behind her without saying anything else to her husband’s mother. She was shaking badly. She had not expected that from herself. But after doing it, she felt a little better.
The mother-in-law got up from the floor and started pounding on the apartment door again. Her screaming filled the entire stairwell. Insults and threats flew toward her daughter-in-law.
Meanwhile, while Inga Valeryevna was raging on the landing outside the door, Nastya called her husband.
“Pash, I told you I didn’t want to go meet your crazy mother!” she said with a trembling voice.
“Okay, quiet, calm down, Natyona. What happened there again? I’m already on my way home.”
“I threw her out of the apartment!” his wife admitted. “She pushed me over the edge. She started insulting me, humiliating me, and I just couldn’t take it. I actually wanted to kill her.”
“I understand,” Pasha replied. “Where is she now?”
“Here, listen,” the woman said and held the phone to the door.
Pavel heard his mother’s wild screams. At that same moment, an incoming call from his mother appeared on the second line.
“I understand,” the man said again. “She’s calling me now. I’ll be home soon. Let her stay on the landing. Don’t let her in so nothing else happens.”
“I wasn’t going to! I’m never letting her in here again at all! And I don’t care that she’s your mother. She looks more like a psychiatric patient. You can take her straight there when you arrive, but she will never set foot in our apartment again!”
Pasha did not argue with his wife. He answered the incoming call from his mother.
“Where the hell are you, Pasha?” Inga Valeryevna immediately started shrieking into the phone. “Do you know what your dear wife did? She grabbed me from behind, like a coward, by the collar of my coat and simply threw me out of the apartment like a naughty kitten! What is this? When you get here, I’ll show her something—oh, that mop won’t know what hit her!”
“Go downstairs,” Pasha said calmly.
“What? I don’t understand. Why should I go downstairs?”
“I said go downstairs. I’ll take you to the train station, and you’ll go back home. You definitely won’t be getting into our place today.”
“What do you mean?” his mother didn’t understand. “Have you decided to get rid of me like this now? Ah, now I get it. Your crazy wife called you and complained about me! And what, are you going to dance to her tune like some lackey?”
“I’m not dancing to anyone’s tune, Mom. I told you: go outside. I’m almost there. I’m taking you to the station now, and from there you’ll go back home. To where your cats are waiting for you. Do whatever you want with them there, but I won’t allow you to treat Nastya like this. I’m tired of it. Every time you come, chaos breaks out in our home, and then there are scandals after you leave. I’m not okay with this.”
“So that’s how it is…” Inga Valeryevna started again.
But Pavel had already hung up, because he knew the conversation could drag on for a long time.
“I’ll still make you pay, you nasty girl!” the mother-in-law shouted through the door. “You won’t hide from me behind that door. I’ll dig you out from under the earth!”
Nastya stood there listening to all of it, but she did not respond to the outbursts of her unstable mother-in-law.
As her son Pavel had demanded, Inga Valeryevna went downstairs and out into the street. Pasha pulled up to the entrance a few minutes later.
His mother got into her son’s car and gave him a spiteful, oppressive look.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked his mother. “Don’t even start telling me now that Nastya is to blame for what happened. I know you perfectly well, Mom, and I know your constant fits.”
“And are you really going to let her get away with everything she just did to me?”
“What am I supposed to do? Go home and beat her up? For what? Because my mother has a grenade in her head?”
“Wonderful! So now I’m to blame too!” the woman began playing the victim. “You know what? Fine, take me to the station, and I’ll go home! But I will never come to you again after such treatment! And I won’t call you my son anymore either!”
“How did you get here?” Pasha asked his mother.
“What do you mean how? By taxi,” his mother answered.
He stopped the car just as they had barely left the courtyard of their building.
“Get out,” he demanded.
“What do you mean, ‘get out’?” the woman didn’t understand.
“That’s exactly what I mean. Since I’m no longer your son, then that means you’re no longer my mother. And I’m not going to drive strange, unfamiliar women around the city. Get out, catch a taxi, and go home. And don’t show up here again. Stop ruining my life. My childhood with you was more than enough for me.”
Pasha reached over and opened the door for his mother. She looked at her son with contempt again, snorted unhappily, and got out of the car.
A few minutes later Pavel was already home.
“What did you do with the psycho?” Nastya asked her husband. “Did you really drive her to the station that quickly?”
“No, she went on her own. We talked a little, and I think she won’t come to us anymore.”
“You think so, or she definitely won’t come?”
“She definitely won’t come,” the man answered, with a little sadness in his voice. “And forgive me. I didn’t think it would turn out like this. I didn’t mean to set you up. You’re not mad at me, are you?”
“We’ll see tomorrow,” Nastya replied.
“What do you mean?” Pasha made a surprised face.
“What do I mean?” his wife smirked. “Tomorrow we’re going to the store, and you’ll apologize to me in the form of those exact boots you promised to buy me today. Or did you think that after everything that happened, I would forget about them?”
