When I finally held the documents in my hands, something inside me seemed to let go: for the first time in a year, I felt not emptiness, but anticipation. Outside the café window, the asphalt was melting in the heat, the air conditioner was pushing out cool air, and I sat there studying the contract the way a child studies a candy wrapper.
Six hundred square meters outside the city.
And not a single person who would tell me I was doing the right thing.
Because everyone was saying the opposite.
“You’ve lost your mind,” my mother even put her tea down beside the table instead of on it when I showed her the bank statement. “Larisa, you’re forty-three, you just got divorced, you’re living in a rented apartment. What country house? What garden beds? Have you ever even held a shovel in your hands?”
I had.
I had once planted a flower bed near the house — petunias, marigolds, everything properly arranged. My husband looked over the fence back then and said, “You must have nothing better to do, digging around like that.” After that, I never went near that flower bed again. Not because of the flowers. I simply lost the desire.
But now I had lost the desire to listen.
My brother called that same evening. His voice sounded as if he were speaking to a mentally ill person. Careful, soft, insinuating.
“Lar, explain the logic to me. You invested everything you got from the property division. That was your financial cushion. And the plot — there’s only an old garden house and a shed there. Who put this idea in your head?”
“No one.”
“Exactly. No one in their right mind would advise something like that.”
He worked as an appraiser at a real estate agency, and in his worldview there were only apartments in new buildings, mortgages using maternity capital, and liquidity. Anything that did not fit that scheme gave him an attack of professional arrogance.
“There isn’t even water there,” he added in a tone as if he were giving a diagnosis. “The well is old, the pump is broken, the electricity was cut off because the previous owner didn’t pay. Do you understand that you’ll have to pour in as much again as you already paid?”
“I understand.”
“And what? You’re going to live in a wreck while saving up for repairs?”
“I am.”
He exhaled into the phone — long and slow, like air escaping from an overinflated tire.
“Mom is right. This is hysteria. You simply don’t realize what you’re doing. Divorce is trauma, Lar. Maybe you should…”
He stopped himself, but I knew the word that had almost slipped out.
Psychologist.
Forbidden word number ten among all the words I no longer wanted to hear after my ex-husband had spent two years convincing me I was “unstable” and “too emotional.”
“Pasha,” I said calmly. “I bought a dacha. Period. Come visit in August if you want. Right now it’s really…”
I faltered, searching for the word.
“A dump,” he suggested.
“Right now there’s a lot of work to do,” I finished.
And there really was a lot of work.
On the first Sunday, I arrived at the plot at seven in the morning with a thermos and three bags from the hardware store.
The minibus dropped me off on the highway, and from there I had to walk past solid fences, behind which construction work rattled — or, on the contrary, there was silence, the kind that comes to dachas that had emptied along with their owners.
My plot was the second to last in the lane. The gate hung on one hinge and opened with a vile screech that made my teeth ache. The path was overgrown with ground elder mixed with nettles. The apple trees had not been pruned for about four years, and the little house — once painted green clapboard, now peeling down to gray bald patches — looked at me with a window that had no trim.
I stood there and looked back at it.
Inside, it smelled of dust and old wood. Not mustiness — exactly old wood, warmed by the sun. A Dutch stove with a crack in its side, a table covered with oilcloth in tiny flowers, a sagging sofa with a spring sticking out. On the windowsill stood a glass jar with dried earth and a dried-up plant.
And silence.
The kind of silence that does not exist in the city.
Only the wind in the apple trees and, somewhere far away, a dog barking.
I went out onto the porch, sat down on the wobbly step, and cried. Not out of pity for myself. Out of relief.
In the last year of my marriage, I had forgotten that silence could exist without reproaches. That you could wake up and not think about what mood the person behind the wall was in. That you could simply sit and listen to the wind, and no one would ask, “Why are you sitting around? Who’s going to make dinner?”
An hour later, I was already pulling out nettles. My hands burned even through my gloves, sweat poured into my eyes, but every plant I tore out felt like a small act of revenge.
Here you are. And you. And you.
A weed — like a reminder of my ex-husband.
A weed — like his mother’s phone calls.
A weed — like my own fears, which I had watered for three years.
By August, I had cleared the plot, found an electrician from a neighboring village who restored the wiring in three days, and persuaded a pensioner from the next street to clean out the well. He shook his head for a long time, examining my “shed,” but when I said I would pay cash and right away, he nodded and came the next morning.
The water started running on the fourth day.
Cloudy, reddish from clay, but water.
I filled a bucket, poured it into the ditch, filled another. Then another.
And suddenly I realized I was laughing out loud.
July and August merged into one endless day. I quit my job as a certification specialist at the dairy plant — after the divorce, I could no longer bear to be there anyway. Too many mutual acquaintances, too many questions, too many sympathetic looks.
I took the rest of my vacation pay and launched online courses for people who wanted to understand product labeling. I worked at night and built during the day.
My brother finally came at the end of August. Without warning. I was painting the shutters — I had bought bright yellow paint and was now frantically dragging the brush over the wood.
“Well, well,” he said, stopping at the gate. “You did this yourself?”
“Myself.”
He walked around the plot. Silently. He looked inside the house — there was already a new gas stove there, a gift from my friend Liza, the only person who had supported me and even taken a week off to help me paint the walls. Pasha touched the freshly whitewashed corners, peered at the new wiring, and shook his head.
“Lar,” he finally said, “do you realize this is now worth twice what you paid for it?”
“I realize.”
“Do you ever sleep at all?”
“I sleep,” I shrugged. “I sleep well here.”
He left without ever saying, “Well done.”
But I had not expected him to.
Autumn became harder. The courses brought in less than I had expected, so I had to take on extra work — consulting for a dairy plant in a neighboring region. I went there twice a week and spent long hours sitting in a cold workshop, checking protocols.
I came home after dark, lit the stove, and cooked myself bean soup — thick, rich, with a smell that made me want to live.
In November, my mother came. Without calling, as always. She did not phone from the gate — she saw it was open and walked in. I was chopping firewood behind the house and did not hear her footsteps right away.
“Larisa,” my mother’s voice was dry as a leaf. “I brought you normal food. You’ve lost weight. Have you even looked at yourself in the mirror?”
In the mirror I saw a woman whose hands had stopped trembling when she poured tea.
“Thank you, Mom. Come inside.”
She spent two hours on the plot, and during that time she made a great many critical remarks.
“The porch should have been concreted.”
“Why do you need three garden beds? You won’t be able to eat all that.”
“You hung the wallpaper yourself? It shows.”
“Does the internet even work here?”
“Who are the neighbors? Isn’t it dangerous alone?”
When she said, “Do you even understand that your father would not have approved of this?” I interrupted her.
“Mom, Dad died eight years ago. He didn’t even know I would get divorced. So let’s not decide for him.”
She pressed her lips together and fell silent.
For about fifteen minutes.
Then she said:
“My neighbor Irka rents out her second apartment. She earns money. And you…”
“And I live,” I answered.
For some reason, that sounded weightier than everything I had said before.
The winter was snowy. I bought a snow shovel and cleared the path every morning — a ritual that replaced exercise for me.
In December, a woman from Krasnodar contacted me. She owned a small cheese-making business and ordered a full audit of her documentation. I worked for two weeks almost without sleep and earned enough to replace the windows.
For the first time in many years, I celebrated New Year alone. I put pine branches in a bucket, hung a battery-powered garland on them, and went out onto the porch at midnight.
Firecrackers thundered in the village, dogs barked themselves hoarse, and I stood there in an old sheepskin coat and felt boots, thinking that now — for the first time in a long while — I did not need to prove anything.
To anyone.
March brought a surprise.
I met a man.
His name was Mikhail, and he appeared on my plot in the middle of the thaw. He had come to buy blackcurrant seedlings after seeing the notice on my gate — I was selling extra bushes that had grown after the autumn replanting. He called.
We talked for forty minutes. We stood by the fence discussing varieties, and then I suddenly said:
“Let’s use informal ‘you’? My name is Larisa.”
“Mikhail,” he smiled. “You know, you’re smiling right now even though you’re standing elbow-deep in mud. That’s rare.”
I laughed and invited him in for tea with dry bread rings.
Mikhail turned out to be a mechanic who adjusted equipment in private bakeries. He had been divorced for five years and had a student daughter who lived with her mother in a nearby city.
He did not make compliments or try to impress me. He simply came on weekends and helped stack firewood.
In April, my mother called and said that Pasha’s anniversary was coming up — his forty-fifth birthday — and that she wanted to gather everyone at my place.
“You’ve been living there for a year already. Let us see what you’ve created.”
“My place,” I said, “is still not fully ready.”
“We’re not coming for an inspection. We’re coming to see you. We are relatives, after all.”
She put pressure on that “after all,” as if reminding me of a debt I had no right to forget.
I agreed.
On the first of May, they arrived.
My mother, Pasha with his wife Dasha, their eleven-year-old son Tyoma, and even Aunt Raya from Voronezh — my mother’s sister, who for the last ten years had communicated with me only through birthday postcards.
I met them at the gate. In a new dress — simple, linen, bought not in a shopping mall but from a seamstress in the neighboring village who sewed from old patterns. The day before, Mikhail had helped me set the table in the garden, put up a canopy, and bring two wicker chairs from his house.
“Wow,” Tyoma said, running onto the plot first. “Mom, look, a hammock!”
And he ran toward the apple trees.
The others entered more slowly.
My mother looked around like an inspector. Pasha walked behind her with his arms crossed over his chest. Dasha carried a bag with salad in a plastic container. Aunt Raya squinted in the sun and kept repeating, “Well, we’ll see, we’ll see.”
I showed them around the house and yard. I showed them the living space — two rooms and a spacious kitchen-living room. I showed them the stove, which Mikhail and I had tiled with ceramic tiles bought by chance at a construction depot. The flower bed. The greenhouse with spinach and radishes. The raspberry bushes along the fence — twelve of them.
“You did all this yourself?” Aunt Raya asked.
“Not all of it. I had help.”
“Who?” my mother immediately latched on.
“A neighbor. And a friend came to help.”
I did not mention Mikhail. I decided — not yet. First let them digest everything else.
Pasha touched the walls and, for some reason, looked into the meter. Dasha admired things out loud — sincerely, it seemed, for the first time ever. Aunt Raya asked for my raspberry jam recipe, although I had not made any jam yet.
And my mother remained silent.
She walked through the house, ran her finger along the windowsill — checking for dust — sat down in the wicker chair, and said:
“You started all this for nothing.”
I was standing by the table, setting out plates.
“Why, Mom?”
“Because one woman alone can’t handle something like this. Right now you’re full of energy, enthusiasm, all that. But then the rains will start, the stove will smoke, you won’t have enough money. Who will need you here then? In the city there are at least people, but here — forests and fences. Who will you talk to?”
“To me, for example.”
Mikhail entered through the gate, which I had forgotten to close. He was wearing a work jacket and holding a crate of tomato seedlings, which he had promised to bring from his friend’s greenhouse. He saw the guests, nodded as if to old acquaintances, and put the crate on the bench.
“I’m Mikhail,” he said simply. “I help Larisa. And you must be her mother?”
My mother did not answer.
She looked at him — at his dirt-stained hands, his simple clothes, the way he smiled — and there was a verdict in her eyes. Not the kind delivered in court, but another kind: domestic, instant.
Not suitable.
“Mom,” I said, “he is my guest.”
“Guest?” she emphasized the word with her voice. “And do such guests come often?”
Pasha coughed. Dasha buried herself in her phone. Tyoma heard nothing — he was hanging in the hammock, swinging so hard the fastenings creaked.
“Often,” I said. “And you know what?”
I looked around at all of them. At everyone who, a year before, had tapped a finger against their temple. Everyone who had called my choice hysteria. Everyone who had diagnosed me and given advice I had not asked for.
“We have decided to be together.”
Silence.
Tyoma broke it.
He fell out of the hammock and screamed. Everyone rushed toward him — pulling him out, brushing him off, fussing over him. The scene instantly turned into a circus, and my words hung in the air, unheard by anyone.
Or heard, but deliberately skipped over — the way adults sometimes pretend not to notice an inconvenient truth, hoping it will dissolve on its own.
But I was not planning to dissolve.
That evening, after the guests had left, I stood at the gate and watched the dust settle behind their car. Mikhail came up behind me and placed his hand on my shoulder.
“Were you serious?” he asked. “About ‘being together’?”
I turned to him. I noticed the gray threads in his hair at the temples, the fine wrinkles around his eyes, the paint under his fingernails — he had painted the fence the day before and had not managed to wash it all off.
“A year ago, I bought this plot,” I said. “There were thickets, rotten boards, and a stove with a crack. And you know what I understood?”
“What?”
“That if a person wants something, they do it. And if they don’t want to, they look for reasons why nothing will work. My relatives — they look for reasons. For themselves. For me. For everyone. It’s their form of care.”
I was silent for a moment.
“I can’t live like that anymore. I don’t want to be constantly evaluated while everyone waits for me to fail.”
Mikhail nodded.
He seemed to understand. Or maybe he had simply known it earlier — from his own experience, from his own relatives.
Three days later, my mother called. Her voice was official, like a secretary’s.
“Larisa, we discussed it. Pasha thinks you’re rushing too much. You barely know this man. You’re in a vulnerable position right now. We agreed that we’ll come again during these same May holidays. The whole family. Me, Pasha with Dasha, Tyoma. And Aunt Raya wants to come too. We’ll sit calmly, rest. You’ll cook something. It’s nice and spacious there.”
She spoke as if she were doing me a favor.
As if my dacha were a sanatorium they had agreed to visit with a voucher.
As if the previous visit had not been a disaster, but a dress rehearsal.
I listened to her and looked at the apple tree outside the window. It had finally blossomed — late, almost in mid-May, but thickly, pure white. Petals slowly circled through the air like snow that did not melt.
“Mom,” I said.
“What?”
“There will be no May holiday visit.”
There was a pause on the line. A long one. I could hear a kettle being turned on at the other end and someone rattling dishes.
“What do you mean?” Her voice became higher, sharper. “You’re refusing your own family? After everything we’ve done for you? Larisa, we supported you all year!”
I laughed.
Honestly, I did not mean to — but the laugh burst out on its own, joyless, almost like a bark.
“Mom, you came here and said it was all for nothing. The only thing you — you, Pasha, and everyone else — did for me was spend an entire year explaining that nothing would work out for me. So why do you now want to rest among the very thing that was not supposed to work out?”
She started breathing quickly, as if preparing to object, but I did not let her.
“The dacha is mine. I bought it with the money you advised me to invest in a mortgage for a two-room apartment in a residential district. I worked myself to the bone for a year and turned a wreck into a real home. And now that everything is ready, you want to come for barbecue?”
“Larisa…”
“No.” I said it quietly but firmly. “Enough.”
I hung up.
My hand was not shaking.
I looked at the screen — two missed calls immediately appeared, one from Pasha and one from an unknown number, probably Aunt Raya. Then a message from Dasha came in on messenger:
“Lar, what’s wrong with you? Call back.”
I did not call back.
Instead, I went out into the garden. Mikhail was working near the greenhouse, tying up the cucumbers. He saw me and straightened.
“Well?”
“I said no.”
“Was it hard?”
I breathed in the warm May air. Somewhere near the road, a moped buzzed. The neighbor’s dog barked lazily, just for form.
“No,” I said. “Surprisingly easy.”
In May, I launched my courses again. I enrolled four groups and earned more than I had all spring. Mikhail moved in some of his things — not all of them, but a toolbox already stood in the corner of the veranda, and his jacket hung on the hook by the entrance. In June, the two of us replaced the roof.
At the end of the month, I went on social media. I saw that Pasha had posted a photo — a new car, bought on credit secured against the apartment. Dasha stood beside it with a strained smile. My mother had commented:
“My son, so handsome, a real man.”
I scrolled on.
Aunt Raya sent me a message:
“Larisa, I keep thinking about your dacha. Forgive us old fools. We were simply afraid for you. And you managed it.”
I read it twice and did not answer.
In July, the phone rang again.
It was my mother. Judging by the number, she was calling from the landline.
I hesitated.
Five rings.
Six.
On the seventh, I answered.
“Larisa,” my mother’s voice was tense, but not hostile. It sounded as if she had rehearsed, then forgotten the text. “I wanted to ask. When will you next be in the city? Maybe we could have dinner together? On neutral territory, so to speak.”
That was exactly what she said — “on neutral territory.”
As if we were warring sides.
“Mom, I can’t right now. Mikhail is helping with the greenhouse. We have a lot to do.”
“We?” she caught on.
“We,” I confirmed.
She was silent.
“I see. Well… maybe in August?”
“Maybe.”
“I want to see what you’ve created there,” she said, and I heard something very distant in her voice, something almost forgotten.
She had repeated my own words — the ones she had said in April.
There was something in that. Either an attempt to build a bridge, or simply an accident.
“We’ll see,” I answered.
And hung up.
It rained during the night. A warm mushroom rain. I lay there listening to the drops tapping against the new sheets of metal on the roof and thought that tomorrow I needed to thin out the carrots.
In the morning, I got up early and went into the garden. The wet leaves shone in the sun. The apples were already swelling — still green, but promising a good harvest. Mikhail was asleep in the house.
I stood in the middle of the plot — barefoot, in an old T-shirt — stretched my whole body toward the sky, and laughed.
Because of the way the cool earth chilled my heels.
Because now, I was my own person.
The skeptics can wait outside the gate.
And I think I’ll put in one more garden bed after all.
Still, what would you say to those who called your decision a mistake if they now asked to come to your dacha?
