“Set the table—Galochka and the kids are almost here!” My mother-in-law decided to throw a family celebration for forty people at our place, but I refused to put up with it.

Set the Table, Galochka and the Kids Are Almost Here! — My Mother-in-Law Decided to Throw a Family Party for Forty People at Our Place, but I Refused to Put Up With It
“Why did you show up looking like that? What on earth are you wearing?”
Larisa stopped in the doorway of her own apartment and blinked slowly. Standing in front of her was Antonina Petrovna in a burgundy dress with ruffles—and wearing Larisa’s amber necklace. The very one that had been lying in a jewelry box on the top shelf of the wardrobe.
“Good evening,” Larisa said evenly.
“Good evening!” her mother-in-law exclaimed, throwing up her hands as though Larisa had not just come home after a fourteen-hour shift but had instead arrived late to her own wedding. “Galochka and the children are already downstairs! And we haven’t served the hot food yet, and there are three whole tubs of potatoes sitting there unpeeled! Hurry up, get changed and get into the kitchen. Don’t just stand there!”
Music was blasting from the living room. Unfamiliar voices, laughter, children shrieking—all of it had packed itself tightly into Larisa’s apartment and occupied it like an army taking over a conquered city.
Larisa looked down at her hands. Her fingers were buzzing—not exactly hurting anymore, just numb and dull, as though they had been exposed to vibration for hours. Twelve sponge cake layers, eight batches of cream, a corporate order for three hundred pastries for a banquet hall. She had gotten up at six in the morning. It was now almost nine in the evening.
“Antonina Petrovna,” she said very calmly, “what exactly is going on here?”
“We’re having a celebration!” her mother-in-law replied, already turning back toward the hallway. “Important people have gathered here, friends of Galochka’s from the ministry. Fedya! Fedya, she’s finally home!”
Fedya peeked out from the kitchen with the expression of a man who knew he was guilty but had not yet decided what exactly he was guilty of. Thirty-two years old, broad shoulders, kind eyes—and completely incapable of saying no to his mother. It might even have been funny if it weren’t so exhausting.
“Larisa, you understand…” he began.
“I understand,” Larisa said. “Come with me for a minute.”
“He doesn’t have time!” Antonina Petrovna cut in. “Fedyechka, the men are talking about hunting in there. Go join them, go on. We’ll manage here without you.”
Fedyechka obediently disappeared.
Larisa walked into the kitchen and stopped in the middle of it. There really were three plastic tubs filled with potatoes on the floor. The countertop was buried beneath other people’s shopping bags, food containers, and boxes. A receipt was stuck to the refrigerator—long as a court sentence. Larisa picked it up with two fingers and held it closer.
Red caviar. Cured fish. Two kinds of outrageously expensive cheese. Three bottles of Ararat cognac. Champagne. A custom-made cake—fifty-seven centimeters in diameter. Larisa automatically noted the layers visible in the photo on the packaging, buttercream, obviously made by a cheap pastry chef.
Total: 48,400 rubles.
She lowered the receipt.
Then she opened the cabinet beneath the sink—the one where she kept her old thermos with the chipped lid. Inside the thermos, tucked between two twisted plastic bags, there were supposed to be fifty thousand rubles.
She had been saving the money for seven months, little by little, quietly, without making a fuss, because the refrigerator had already been repaired twice, and the technician had honestly told her the last time:
“Next time, it’ll be easier to buy a new one.”
The thermos was empty.
Larisa put it back.
Carefully, she slid the cabinet shut.
Someone burst out laughing in the living room—loudly and heartily, the way people laugh when they are having a wonderful time and do not care in the slightest about the owner of the apartment standing in the kitchen holding an empty thermos.
She found Fedya in the hallway. He was carrying someone a glass of juice and looked almost happy, the way he always did when his mother was nearby and everything was going exactly the way she believed it should.
“Fedya,” Larisa said quietly. “The money from the thermos.”

He stumbled.
“Lar, wait. Mom will explain. It’s not that simple…”
“Forty-eight thousand rubles. My money. From my drawer.”
“Well, Mom said you knew about it!” His voice took on the tone of a child who had been caught but still hoped he might talk his way out of it. “She said you suggested it yourself, that you two had an agreement…”
“I left home at six this morning,” Larisa said. “When exactly did we manage to make that agreement?”
Fedya set the glass on the side table and rubbed the back of his head.
“Listen, can we not do this right now? We have guests. There are people from the ministry in there, Galochka’s contacts. Those connections are important. We’ll talk later.”
“Later,” Larisa repeated.
Something in her voice made him look at her.
Really look at her, not just glance.
He saw the gray circles beneath her eyes, the work uniform dotted with tiny spots of cream, her hair hastily gathered at the back of her head.
And her expression.
She wasn’t angry.
She wasn’t hurt.
She was calm.
That was what frightened him.
“All right,” he said, picking up the glass again. “All right, Larisa, don’t make such a big…”
But she was already walking toward the bedroom.
Antonina Petrovna intercepted her at the door, appearing from nowhere as she always seemed to do at the worst possible moment.
“Where are you going? There’s no time to change. Galochka just arrived with all three children. We need to set the table!”
“They can wait,” Larisa said and closed the bedroom door behind her.
She sat on the edge of the bed.
For one minute, she remained in silence—relative silence, because the roar of someone else’s celebration in her own home still seeped through the walls.
Then she stood up, pulled a small bag from beneath the bed, and began carefully packing.
Documents went on top.
Passport.
Property ownership certificate.
Employment record book in its blue cover.
She plugged her phone in to charge—the socket was beside the headboard.
A change of clothes.
A makeup bag.
Then she picked up Pryanik from the windowsill—the ginger, phlegmatic cat who was the only resident of the apartment she could not leave behind.
Pryanik looked at her with sleepy eyes, yawned, and allowed himself to be placed into his carrier.
Larisa put on her jacket.
Then she stepped into the hallway.
Antonina Petrovna was just coming from the kitchen carrying a tray of clinking glasses. She saw the bag and the pet carrier and froze.
“What is this?”
“I’m leaving,” Larisa said.
“Where?!” Her mother-in-law’s voice rose to the pitch that normally made everyone obey her. “There are guests here! People from the ministry are sitting in there, do you understand? Fedya will have to explain everything afterward!”
“Fedya,” Larisa agreed, “will have to.”
She walked into the narrow vestibule beside the front door. Behind the meter, set into the wall, was the apartment’s electrical panel. The key still hung from the hook where the previous owner had left it.
Larisa took the key, inserted it into the lock, opened the panel, found the main breaker, and flipped it down.
The apartment died.
The music cut off in the middle of a word.
The refrigerator gave a quiet grunt and went silent.
A collective gasp came from the living room.
Then a child began crying.
Then a man’s voice shouted:
“What the hell?”
Larisa locked the electrical panel and put the key into her jacket pocket.
In complete darkness, she felt for the handle of the front door, stepped onto the landing, and quietly closed the door behind her.
Pryanik gave a soft meow from inside the carrier.
“I know,” Larisa told him. “I know.”
She walked downstairs and stepped outside.
The September air smelled of wet asphalt and someone’s smoke—somewhere nearby, leaves were being burned.
Larisa took out her phone and ordered a taxi.
While she waited, she stood by the entrance and looked up at the windows of her floor.
Lights from phone flashlights were already moving around inside—chaotic, frantic.
Voices drifted out.
Then one of the windows opened and Antonina Petrovna leaned outside.
“Larisa!” she shouted into the dark courtyard. “Larisa, give us the key immediately!”
The taxi pulled up.
Larisa lifted the carrier, picked up her bag, and got into the back seat.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Out of town,” she said. “There’s a spa hotel on the highway. I’ll send you the address.”
The car started moving.
Larisa leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes.
Her hands were still buzzing slightly, the echo of a very long day.
But somewhere inside her, in the place where something had been tightening and enduring for the last several hours, there was suddenly an unexpected quiet.
Her phone rang three minutes later.
Fedya.
Larisa looked at the screen, waited for the call to end, and put the phone back in her pocket.
Then she took it out again and switched it to silent mode.
The spa hotel was called Birch Grove and stood twenty kilometers outside the city at the edge of a pine forest.
Larisa had been there once, three years earlier, at a company party for the factory where she worked.
Back then she had spent the entire evening sitting at the table, drinking tea and thinking that she should come here someday for no particular reason.
Then she forgot.
Then she forgot again.
Now the receptionist—a young man with a neatly trimmed beard—looked at the pet carrier and politely asked:
“With an animal?”
“If that’s allowed.”
“We have rooms for guests with pets. There’s a small extra charge.”
“That’s fine,” Larisa said, taking out her card.
Pryanik sat in the carrier looking like someone who had long ago become accustomed to unexpected relocations, although that was not true at all.
The cat had lived in the same place for all five years of his life and hated car rides.
But right now, he was silent.
Perhaps he could sense his owner’s mood.
Cats can do that.
The room was small but peaceful: wooden wall panels, a window overlooking the forest, a wide bed with white linens.
Larisa let Pryanik out.
He immediately inspected the perimeter, sniffed the armchair, jumped onto the windowsill, and sat staring into the dark forest as though this was exactly where he had always belonged.
Larisa took a shower.
She stood beneath the hot water for a long time, until the feeling in her shoulders finally loosened—that sensation as though someone had been gripping her by the back of the neck all day.
Then she wrapped herself in a robe, ordered tea and sandwiches to the room, and lay on top of the blanket.
She never turned the sound back on her phone.
But the screen kept lighting up.
Again and again.
Fedya.
Then an unknown number.
Then Fedya again.
Then a number she recognized.
Antonina Petrovna was calling from someone else’s phone, apparently because she could not charge her own in the dark apartment.
Clever.
Larisa poured herself some tea, picked up a cheese sandwich, and looked out the window.
There was the forest.
There was the night.
And there was silence.
Real silence.
No strange voices.
No strange music.
She thought about the money.
Forty-eight thousand rubles—not all of the fifty thousand that had been in the thermos.
That meant Antonina Petrovna had left roughly fifteen hundred rubles behind.
Out of greed or carelessness—it no longer mattered.
What mattered was something else.
She had opened someone else’s drawer, taken someone else’s money, and then lied to her son that his wife had “approved everything herself.”
Calmly.
Without a trace of doubt.
As if she had every right to do it.
And Fedya…
He had not asked.
He had not checked.
He had not called.
It had been easier for him to believe his mother than to make one phone call to his wife.
That was what Larisa kept turning over in her head while the pine trees rustled outside.
It was not anger.
It was not hurt.
It was something calmer than that—and because of that, something much more serious.
Something that finally stands up to its full height and looks you straight in the eyes.
Pryanik jumped down from the windowsill, came over to the bed, lay beside her, and began purring loudly.
“You’re right,” Larisa told him. “Time to sleep.”
In the morning, she woke at half past eight—the first time in several months without an alarm clock.
She lay there listening to neighbors eating breakfast somewhere beyond the wall, the hum of the ventilation system, and Pryanik industriously scratching his claws against the corner of the armchair.
Then she got up, washed her face, and turned the sound back on her phone.
There were twenty-three messages.
Forty-one missed calls.
She poured herself a glass of water, drank it, and began reading.
At one in the morning, Fedya had written:
“Larisa, this has gone too far. Do you understand what you did? The ministry people left. Mom is crying. Galochka’s children are screaming. The electricity is still off—you have the key. Come home.”
At three:
“All right, I understand that you’re upset. But you can’t behave like this.”
At five in the morning, very briefly:
“The refrigerator has defrosted. There was meat in it.”
Larisa finished reading, put down the phone, and ordered breakfast to her room.
An omelet.
Toast.
Coffee.
While she waited, she browsed the hotel’s spa menu.
A back massage was reasonably priced.
She booked one for eleven.
Then she called her friend Katya—not to complain, simply to warn her that if Fedya or his mother started calling Katya’s number looking for Larisa, she should know that everything was fine.
Larisa was safe.
She had simply taken some time away.
“They already called,” Katya said without preamble. “Antonina Petrovna. Last night at eleven-thirty. She said you had ‘committed sabotage’ and ‘disgraced the family in front of respectable people.’”
“Uh-huh,” Larisa said.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m at Birch Grove.”
Katya was silent for a second.
“Alone?”
“With Pryanik.”
“I see,” Katya said. “Want me to come?”
“No. I want some quiet.”
“Okay. But call me when you decide what you’re going to do.”
Larisa promised and hung up.
The massage turned out to be good.
The therapist worked silently, without unnecessary conversation, and for forty minutes Larisa almost fell asleep.
She left the treatment room feeling as though someone had finally squeezed all the tension out of her and carefully put her back together—not carelessly, but properly, seam by seam.
She ate lunch at the hotel restaurant.
Soup.
A cutlet with potatoes.
Fruit drink.
Ordinary cafeteria-style food, nothing fancy.
At the table next to hers sat an elderly couple. They spoke quietly about something of their own and occasionally laughed.
Larisa watched them and thought:
So this is what it looks like when things are normal.
After lunch she went outside.
September was dry. The leaves on the birch trees had already turned yellow but were still clinging to the branches.
She walked along the path beside the forest.
Then walked it again.
Then stopped at a bench and simply sat there, listening to the wind push leaves across the asphalt.
By evening, she had made a decision.
It was not dramatic.
It was not rushed.
It was quiet.
The kind of decision that comes when you finally understand something that has been growing inside you for a long time and can at last put it into words.
Larisa took out her phone and sent Fedya a single message:
“I’ll come back around lunchtime tomorrow. We need to talk.”
He replied instantly, as though he had been waiting:
“Finally. Mom is here too. She wants to explain herself.”
Larisa looked at the words.
Mom is here too.
Of course she was.
How could anything happen without her?
Larisa put the phone away and walked back toward the hotel.
Pryanik greeted her at the room door with a sleepy expression, stretched, and lay down again.
Outside, the sky darkened.
The forest turned blue, then black.
Somewhere far away, a light flickered—perhaps a village, perhaps a car on the highway.
Larisa went to bed early.
And for the first time in a very long while, she slept without dreaming.
The taxi entered the courtyard at half past twelve the next day.
Larisa paid the driver, got out, lifted Pryanik’s carrier, and looked up at the windows of her apartment.
One window was open, which meant someone was inside.
Not that she had doubted it.
The apartment building smelled of someone else’s food—sour and stale.
She noticed the smell on the first floor and realized that overnight the apartment must have absorbed everything: spoiled meat from the defrosted refrigerator, leftover appetizers, and the remnants of someone else’s celebration that had ended badly.
She opened the door with her own key.
What she saw in the entryway could have been called devastation, but the word seemed too small.
Someone’s forgotten shoes lay on the floor—women’s shoes with pointed toes.
A stranger’s jacket hung on the coat rack.
In the hallway, directly in the middle of the walkway, stood a half-empty bottle of cognac.
Ararat, three stars.
Larisa stepped over it and entered the living room.
The carpet had a dark stain on it—red wine, judging by the smell.
A diagonal crack ran across the television screen.

The tablecloth had been pulled crookedly across the table.
One plate lay on the floor—unbroken, simply fallen.
A blanket Larisa had brought back from a business trip two years ago was crumpled into a heap on the sofa.
She looked at everything calmly.
The way someone examines a crime scene—carefully, without unnecessary emotion.
A sound came from the kitchen.
Larisa went in.
Antonina Petrovna was sitting at the table.
She was no longer wearing the burgundy dress, but instead a house robe that looked unfamiliar and much too large for her.
Larisa’s amber necklace was still around her neck.
A cup of cold coffee and an ashtray sat in front of her—even though Antonina Petrovna had never smoked in Larisa’s presence before.
Apparently, she had stopped pretending.
She looked up.
And for the first time in all the years Larisa had known her, there was no commanding squint in those eyes, no familiar prosecutorial expression.
There was something else.
Not remorse.
No, it was far too early for that.
More like the confusion of a person whose familiar world had suddenly stopped behaving the way it was supposed to.
“So you finally showed up,” she said.
There was no force behind it.
She was simply stating a fact.
“I did,” Larisa agreed and set Pryanik’s carrier on the floor.
The cat shifted inside.
“Fedya!” Antonina Petrovna called. “Fedya, she’s here!”
Fedya came out of the bedroom.
His clothes were wrinkled, he had not shaved, and his entire appearance suggested that he had had a difficult night.
Larisa looked at him thoughtfully, the way someone studies a familiar object they are considering removing from its usual place.
“Well,” he said. “Shall we talk?”
“We will,” Larisa said. “But first…”
She walked over to Antonina Petrovna, took the amber necklace between two fingers, and removed it from her neck—carefully, without jerking, the way a person takes back something that belongs to them.
Antonina Petrovna flinched but said nothing.
Larisa slipped the necklace into her jacket pocket and turned to her husband.
“Sit down.”
He sat.
His mother started to pull her chair closer too, but Larisa said:
“Antonina Petrovna, this conversation is between Fedya and me.”
“I’m his mother. I have the right—”
“Please wait in the living room.”
There was something in the way Larisa said “please” that made her mother-in-law stand up and leave.
Larisa herself was surprised.
But she did not show it.
They were alone.
Larisa sat across from her husband, folded her hands on the table, and looked at him.
“Fedya, I’m not going to shout,” she said. “Just tell me honestly: did you know the money was taken without my permission?”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“Well, Mom said you knew…”
“I left home at six in the morning. You didn’t call me. I didn’t call you. When exactly did we supposedly agree to it?”
Silence.
“You didn’t check,” Larisa said. “It was more convenient for you to believe your mother. Because if you had called me and asked, you would have had to tell her no. And you don’t know how to do that.”
“Larisa, that doesn’t mean—”
“Forty-eight thousand rubles, Fedya. I saved that money for seven months. A little from every paycheck. You know how hard I work. You saw my hands yesterday evening.”
He looked away.
That was his way of avoiding an answer—looking somewhere past her, at the wall, the window, nowhere at all.
Larisa stood.
She went to the bedroom, opened the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, and took out a blue plastic folder.
She returned to the kitchen and placed it on the table in front of Fedya.
He looked at the folder.
Then at her.
“What is that?”
“Open it.”
He opened it.
The apartment documents were on top—the ownership certificate in the name of Larisa Sergeyevna Morozova.
Beneath them were blank forms she had printed that morning at the hotel after asking the receptionist to help her use the printer.
“This is a divorce application,” Larisa said. “I haven’t filed it. Yet.”
Fedya looked up at her, and she saw something alive in his eyes.
Fear, perhaps.
Or something like understanding—the kind that arrives far too late, but arrives nevertheless.
“Larisa…”
“Wait. I’m not finished.”
She sat down again.
“I don’t want a scandal. I don’t want to divide up the dishes and argue about who is more to blame. I want one thing: for you—not me, not your mother, but you—to make a decision yourself. Either you’re an adult man, a husband, and we talk to each other like two adults. Or you’re your mother’s little boy, and then we have nothing left to discuss. Because I’m not going to live in this apartment with the two of you.”
“Mom has nothing to do with—”
“Your mother took my money,” Larisa said evenly. “Your mother invited forty people into my apartment without asking me. Your mother wore my jewelry without permission. And you allowed all of it. So yes, she has quite a lot to do with this.”
Fedya was silent for a long time.
Larisa did not hurry him.
Outside, the poplar tree rustled.
The sour smell of yesterday’s celebration floated through the kitchen.
Pryanik breathed quietly inside his carrier.
“I’ll give the money back,” Fedya finally said. “From my own account. Today.”
“Good.”
“And…” He hesitated. “And Mom needs to leave. I’ll tell her.”
Larisa looked at him.
For a long moment.
Carefully.
“You’ll tell her yourself?”
“Myself.”
She nodded and stood.
Larisa did not listen to Fedya’s conversation with his mother.
She went into the bedroom, let Pryanik out, and opened the window.
The September air was cool and odorless—just air.
Fresh.
Outdoor air.
Real.
Somewhere below, the building entrance door slammed and a car drove past.
Voices drifted in from the living room.
Antonina Petrovna was saying something sharply. Larisa could hear the tone but not the words.
Then Fedya’s voice—quieter, but firmer than usual.
Then a pause.
Then Antonina Petrovna again, but differently now.
Wounded.
Tearful.
Larisa scratched Pryanik behind the ear.
Twenty minutes later, there was rustling in the hallway, the coat rack clattered, and the front door slammed.
Fedya looked into the bedroom.
He looked as though he had just run a marathon—but had made it to the finish line.
“She left,” he said.
“I can see that,” Larisa replied.
He hesitated, shifting from one foot to the other.

“I’ll transfer the money now. And… should I call a cleaning service?”
“Call one.”
“Larisa,” he said, stopping at the door. “I understand that this isn’t an excuse. But I really didn’t think it would turn out like this.”
Larisa looked at him.
“I know you didn’t think,” she said. “That’s exactly the problem, Fedya. You didn’t think.”
He left to make the call.
She stayed by the window.
In the courtyard below, Antonina Petrovna was getting into a taxi—back straight, lips tightly pressed together, handbag tucked beneath her arm.
Larisa watched from above as she slammed the car door and the taxi drove away.
Then she looked at the poplar tree.
Yellow patches had begun appearing among the leaves.
Autumn was taking them slowly, one or two at a time.
Behind her, Pryanik jumped onto the bed and began purring loudly.
Larisa took a deep breath.
Cool air.
The smell of leaves.
The quiet courtyard.
The folder containing the divorce papers was still lying on the kitchen table.
She did not put it away yet.
Let it stay there.
They bought a new refrigerator in October.
Larisa chose it herself.
She went to the store on a Saturday without rushing, asked the salesperson to explain the differences between the models, and eventually bought the one she had wanted from the beginning: spacious, quiet, with the freezer on the bottom.
Fedya transferred the money back that same day, just as he had promised.
Every last ruble.
Antonina Petrovna did not call for three weeks.
Then she finally did, speaking in an unusually cautious voice, like someone who for the first time in her life was uncertain how the other person would react.
She said something about her health.
Something about the weather.
At the end, she added that she would repay the money in installments.
Larisa answered briefly:
“All right. Agreed.”
And she was the first to say goodbye.
Fedya changed slowly.
Not suddenly.
Not theatrically.
He simply began doing things he had never done before.
He asked before agreeing to anything.
Once, Larisa accidentally overheard him telling his mother on the phone:
“That doesn’t work for us.”
Larisa said nothing.
She merely made a mental note of it.
She put the folder with the divorce papers into a drawer.
She did not throw it away.
She put it away.
That was a distinction she understood perfectly well.
Galochka appeared in November with the expression of someone who had supposedly come to make peace but had really come to test whether things could go back to the way they had been before.
Larisa served her tea.
They talked about the children.
About the weather.
Then Larisa politely showed her out.
Galochka never called again.
At the factory, Larisa received a bonus for the September order.
She saved part of it and spent the rest on a course she had wanted to take for a long time—French pastry, real croissants, proper laminated dough.
The first batch came out crooked and burned on the bottom.
The second was better.
Pryanik sniffed the third batch with respect.
Life went on.
Without thunder.
Without drama.
It simply continued in the way life does when people stop interfering with it.
One evening, Larisa sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and looking out at the dark courtyard.
She thought about how, a year earlier, she would not have been able to explain what exactly had been missing from her life.
Now she knew.
Silence.
Her own private, unoccupied silence.
The kind that exists when there are no strangers’ voices in your apartment, no strangers’ decisions, and no strangers’ hands going through your drawers.
Pryanik jumped onto the windowsill, sat beside her, and looked out into the courtyard with her.
A fine November rain was falling outside.
It felt good.