“My Gift Is in the Trash? Excellent. Your Spa Vacation Has Been Canceled Too.”
“In respectable families, dear, people don’t drink from old junk like this.”
Zinaida Petrovna disdainfully picked up a delicate cup decorated with faded pink roses, holding it between two fingers. She turned it in front of her face as though inspecting spoiled food, then opened her fingers.
A sharp crack rang through the kitchen.
The fragments scattered into the trash bin, mixing with potato peelings. The saucer followed.
Dasha froze in the doorway. The heavy grocery bags she had carried all the way from the bus stop after a night shift at the pharmacy painfully pulled at her arms.
“What are you doing?”
“Making your new home more comfortable.”
Her mother-in-law dusted off her hands and adjusted the large brooch pinned to her chest.
“This tea set is the height of bad taste. Looking at this petty-bourgeois nightmare physically hurts me. Seryozha will buy some proper modern dishes later. Without flowers.”
Dasha lowered the bags onto a stool. Her back ached with exhaustion. She looked from the trash bin to the kitchen cabinets.
Everything was perfectly, almost sterilely tidy.
And her jars were gone.
“Where is my facial serum?”
Dasha stepped toward the sink.
“And my vitamins? They were standing here beside the water filter.”
“In the same place as those dreadful cups.”
Zinaida Petrovna waved dismissively while straightening the lace tablecloth that had shifted to one side.
“Dear, why do you need all those chemicals? At your age, you should put sour cream on your face instead of wasting crazy amounts of money on chemicals. I read the ingredients. Nothing but poison. I’m getting rid of this rubbish for you. A home should be clean.”
Dasha looked into the bin.
The glass bottle of serum she had saved for two months to buy lay at the very bottom, soaked in the remains of yesterday’s borscht. Beside it was the plastic jar of vitamins.
And the shattered pieces of her grandmother’s tea set.
“Mom, honestly, why are you touching other people’s things?”
Seryozha hovered in the hallway, hiding his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants. His frightened gaze shifted from his mother to his wife. He clearly had no desire to interfere in the approaching scandal.
“Seryozha, you understand nothing about household aesthetics!”
His mother-in-law began wiping the empty countertop with a damp sponge.
“All this visual clutter gives me migraines. You’ve moved into a respectable two-room apartment. You need to live up to it instead of dragging your dormitory habits with you.”
Without speaking, Dasha took a packet of pasta, a can of stewed meat, and a carton of ten eggs from the bag.
That apartment had cost her an incredible amount of effort.
The mortgage had been approved in her name alone. She had spent three years saving for the down payment, denying herself practically everything.
Seryozha had conveniently lost his job four months earlier. Since then, he had been actively “finding himself,” spending entire days playing video games on the sofa.
All the household expenses, loan payments, utility bills, and groceries had fallen entirely on Dasha’s shoulders.
“Did you buy this cheap milk again?”
Zinaida Petrovna peered into a bag Dasha had not yet unpacked.
“I told Seryozha it gives me heartburn. You could have bought farm-fresh milk in a glass bottle. I’ll be here until evening, and I need decent milk for my coffee.”
“Farm-fresh milk costs three times as much.”
Dasha dropped the pasta onto the table.
“And I’m working one and a half shifts so that we have enough money to pay the mortgage.”
“Oh, don’t make yourself out to be some great martyr, dear!”
Her mother-in-law threw up her hands indignantly.
“Seryozha is only temporarily looking for work. The boy is going through a creative crisis. His bosses didn’t appreciate him. He’s a provider on pause. A wife should support her husband during a difficult time, not reproach him over every piece of bread.”
“A provider on pause?”
Dasha looked at her husband.
Seryozha immediately pretended that he urgently needed to check something extremely important on his phone.
“That provider hasn’t contributed a single ruble toward the utilities in four months. I take night shifts, Zinaida Petrovna, so that your boy can calmly search for himself without going hungry.”
“Don’t be so dramatic!”
Her mother-in-law raised her chin proudly.
“You’re a family. Today you carry the burden, tomorrow he will. Besides, Seryozha told me yesterday that he has an excellent project coming up.”
Seryozha guiltily hunched his shoulders.
Dasha knew all about that “project.” It was another idea to open an online sneaker store without any investment, and it would die within a week.
The day before had been Zinaida Petrovna’s anniversary.
For an entire week, Seryozha had whined that his mother needed a special gift. When Dasha received her quarterly bonus, she gritted her teeth but set aside a substantial amount for a trip to a good health resort.
She had gone to the travel agency herself, chosen the dates, and completed the paperwork.
The gift envelope bearing the health resort’s logo was now lying on the dining table, propped against the sugar bowl.
Zinaida Petrovna had been admiring it all morning.
“My grandmother’s tea set was precious to me because of the memories attached to it.”
Dasha spoke evenly, without raising her voice.
“All the more reason!”
Zinaida Petrovna snorted.
“It was junk. Old things should be thrown away without regret. Otherwise, nothing new will enter your life. I’m older than you, so listen to me. Remember this rule, dear. Get rid of everything unnecessary. Free up space.”
Dasha silently stared at the woman.
Suddenly, her exhaustion vanished, replaced by a ringing, crystal-clear sense of purpose.
She walked over to the dining table.
She reached out.
And picked up the thick gift envelope.
“Hey, where are you taking that?”
Seryozha became alarmed and stepped into the kitchen.
“Dasha, what are you planning?”
Dasha did not answer.
She walked toward the bin filled with potato peelings.
“Dasha!”
Her mother-in-law’s voice trembled when she realized where her daughter-in-law was going.
“Put that back! That is my gift!”
“Old and unnecessary things should be thrown away without regret.”
Dasha pronounced each word clearly.
She tore the thick cardboard envelope in half.
The stamped certificate and the voucher for fourteen days of treatment, paid for with her sleepless nights, crumpled beneath her fingers.
Dasha tore the paper again.
Then she threw the pieces into the bin, directly on top of the broken cup and the serum drenched in borscht.
“What have you done?!”
Zinaida Petrovna shrieked and lunged toward the bin.
“Seryozha! Did you see that? She’s completely insane! My trip to Karlovy Vary!”
“Dasha, you really went too far.”
Seryozha shifted from one foot to the other while staring at the ruined certificate.
“We paid a fortune for that! How is Mom supposed to go now?”
“We?”
Dasha turned toward her husband.
“We paid for it?”
Seryozha stepped back and lowered his gaze to the floor.
“I paid for the trip,” Dasha said, separating each word.
“With my bonus. As a gesture of goodwill. But Zinaida Petrovna is right. There should be nothing unnecessary in the house. I have reconsidered our expenses for this month. Sponsoring someone else’s vacation while that person destroys my possessions and smashes my dishes is unnecessary.”
“You ungrateful wretch!”
Her mother-in-law wailed while trying to retrieve the torn pieces from the trash.
Her fingers became covered in greasy broth.
“I came here with the best intentions! I wanted to help! And you… Seryozha! Say something to your wife! Make her call them and get it restored!”
Seryozha nervously scratched the back of his head.
“Dasha, maybe we really should restore it. They must have the number in their database. They can print a duplicate. You lost your temper. It happens. Mom will apologize, won’t you, Mom?”
Despite her dirty hands, Zinaida Petrovna straightened proudly.
“Absolutely not! Apologize to that rude woman? Never! She can restore it without making a fuss. It is my rightful anniversary gift!”
Dasha took a wet wipe from the packet on the table and slowly cleaned her hands.
“A duplicate can be obtained from the travel agency’s office.”
She looked at her husband.
“The service costs practically nothing.”
Zinaida Petrovna gave her son a triumphant look.
“See? Nothing terrible happened. She’ll go there tomorrow and bring back a new one.”
“Seryozha will go.”
Dasha threw the used wipe into the bin.
“And he will pay the remaining balance.”
Seryozha’s eyes widened.
“What do you mean, the remaining balance? It’s already paid for!”
“Only a thirty-percent deposit was paid.”
Dasha sat down on the stool, feeling her exhausted legs throbbing.
“The rest has to be paid by noon tomorrow according to the contract. I was planning to do it in the morning after my shift. But since we’re getting rid of everything unnecessary, I’ll use that money to make an early mortgage payment. So, Seryozha, obtaining the duplicate and paying the full amount are now your responsibility.”
The kitchen became very quiet.
The only sound was the monotonous hum of the elevator in the stairwell.
“You… you didn’t pay the full amount?”
Seryozha muttered.
“No.”
“But how am I supposed to buy Mom the trip now? I don’t have a single ruble!”
“That’s your problem. You’re her son, so you figure it out. You could find a job, for example. Or take out a payday loan in your own name.”
Red blotches spread across Zinaida Petrovna’s face.
Her gaze moved from the scraps in the bin to her daughter-in-law as she realized that the trip she had been boasting about to her friends all week had just vanished into thin air.
“I will never set foot in this apartment again!”
Her mother-in-law spat the words and threw the dirty pieces of paper back into the bin.
“Live with your greedy, vulgar wife, son! Just don’t come crying to me afterward!”
She stomped into the hallway.
Her raincoat rustled.
The door closed without making much noise because the soft-close mechanism worked smoothly.
Seryozha remained standing in the middle of the kitchen.
“Well, this is just great,” he muttered, staring at the empty countertop.
“What am I supposed to do now? I’m ashamed to face my mother.”
Dasha pulled the grocery bag closer.
“Go play your video game, Seryozha. And take out the trash on your way. The bin is full.”
Two months later, Seryozha finally moved out.
He left quietly, without any arguments, packing his belongings into a sports bag and several plastic bags.
He returned to his mother’s small Soviet-era apartment, tired of the fact that food in the new two-room apartment appeared in the refrigerator in portions meant strictly for one person, while the internet had been disconnected specifically from his devices because of nonpayment.
Dasha was not upset.
Paying the mortgage alone turned out to be much easier than supporting a grown man who was searching for himself.
As for her grandmother’s tea set, she glued it back together.
Not to drink coffee from it, of course.
She simply arranged it on the highest kitchen shelf.
For comfort.
