My Husband Forbade Me from Becoming a Director. I Silently Packed My Bag and Left a Surprise on the Nightstand
“You’re destroying a perfectly normal family over some stupid position!”
Semyon violently hurled a colorful oven mitt onto the dining table. It slid across the plastic tablecloth and fell to the floor. Neither of them bothered to pick it up. Red blotches spread across his face with indignation.
“What exactly are you talking about, Syoma?”
Lena struggled to pull the zipper closed on her large travel bag. She deliberately moved slowly. It had been dark outside for hours, the upstairs neighbors were moving furniture around as usual, and inside her cramped kitchen, fifteen years of being accustomed to living badly—but together—were falling apart.
“I’m talking about this new job of yours!”
He jabbed a short finger toward the empty cup on the table.
“Regional director! What nonsense. Who needs you there at forty-four? Look at you, suddenly acting like some big-shot director. You probably stole the position from someone younger, and they’ll tear you apart within the first month. And you’ll embarrass me in front of the guys.”
“Embarrass you?”
She abandoned the stubborn zipper, straightened up, and looked directly at her husband.
“How exactly? By paying off our mortgage in three years instead of ten? Or by no longer having to beg you for money to buy winter boots?”
“I earn perfectly well!”
Semyon sprang up angrily, nearly knocking over the stool.
He worked as a warehouse clerk at a construction supply depot. His schedule—one twenty-four-hour shift followed by three days off—suited him perfectly. His salary barely covered gasoline for the car and occasional drinking sessions with his friends in the garage, but he had enough ambition for three senior executives.
“I work myself to death!”
He slammed his fist on the table.
“And everything disappears into a black hole! All I ever hear from you is: give me money for utilities, give me money for groceries, we need to send money for Danya’s education. You should earn money for your own little desires. And now you’ve suddenly become some big boss? You’re going to start running around on business trips?”
“Yes, I am.”
Lena folded her arms across her chest. Suddenly, she felt surprisingly light. There was no fear and none of the familiar guilt she usually felt whenever she dared to think about herself.
“I’ll travel for business, and I’ll stay late for meetings. Can you imagine, Syoma? They offered me excellent money for doing it.”
“And what about the house?”
He stared at her in genuine confusion.
“Who’s going to cook for me? Who’s going to clean? I have a bad stomach. I need a hot meal every day, and you know that! A woman is supposed to maintain the home! This is what happens when you give women too much freedom. I gave you freedom, and now you’ve climbed onto my neck and made yourself comfortable.”
“You gave me freedom?”
She couldn’t help bursting into laughter. The statement sounded so absurd that Lena did not even try to hide the bitter irony in her voice.
“Syoma, I’ve worked two jobs for fifteen years. When Danya was little, I stayed up at night preparing other people’s reports at the kitchen table so we could afford food for him. Meanwhile, you spent six months lying on the sofa because you were supposedly trying to find yourself.”
“I was looking for a respectable job!”
He cut her off mid-sentence.
“A man shouldn’t break his back working for someone else for pennies. I was thinking about our family’s future.”
“He was thinking about the future.”
Lena walked over to the shelf beside the hallway mirror and picked up her makeup bag.
“We all remember your plans for the future. Like the time you decided to start a business and bought a pile of broken electric scooters to rent out. They’re still rusting on the balcony. We took out a loan to buy them, by the way.”
“It was a startup!”
Semyon frowned and folded his arms across his chest.
“The idea was brilliant. The competitors simply crushed me. And anyway, there’s no point bringing up the past.”
“Because whoever remembers the past should lose an eye?”
She tossed the makeup bag on top of her belongings.
“Should I forget about the chinchilla farm too? You promised we would become rich. Instead, the animals escaped into the neighbors’ apartment, and we had to pay a fine because they chewed through a cable.”
“I was looking for opportunities!”
He raised his voice and moved onto the offensive.
“I didn’t want us to spend our entire lives crammed inside this box! I was doing it all for you, but I never got any support. All you ever do is criticize me. You nag me until I finally give in. I feel like a teenage son whose mother is constantly pulling his strings.”
“You never attended a single parent-teacher meeting for your own son.”
Lena spoke calmly, without emotion, and that made her words strike even harder.
“The boy grew up and moved to another city to study, and you don’t even know what department he’s in.”
“Of course I know!”
He waved his hand and looked away.
“It’s that… what do you call it… computer department. He’s going to be a programmer. He stares at a monitor all day long.”
“He studies architecture, Syoma. Architecture.”
She shook her head.
“And I’m paying for his education. I’m paying with the money I earn while you sit in the garage with your friends, philosophizing about how unfair the world is to honest working men.”
The previous evening was supposed to have been a celebration. Lena had returned home with news of the long-awaited promotion. The job would be difficult, and she would carry enormous responsibility, but this was her opportunity—an opportunity to escape the endless humiliation of counting every penny.
She had bought a cake and prepared dinner. She had expected nothing more than a simple congratulations.
Instead, she had received a lecture about a woman’s proper role.
His wife’s promotion had struck Semyon in his most vulnerable place: his inflated pride. He could not accept that the woman he had spent years convincing of her own inadequacy had suddenly become more successful than he was.
“Then get out!”
Semyon followed her into the hallway.
“You think I can’t survive without you? I’ll finally be able to breathe! No one will nag me from morning until night. You’ve turned me into an errand boy. Go there, bring this, put up a shelf…”
“I asked you to repair the bathroom faucet, Syoma.”
Lena firmly buttoned her coat.
“I asked you for a month. I reminded you every morning. Eventually, I called a repairman and paid him myself.”
“She called a repairman!”
He curled his lips contemptuously.
“You waste the family’s money on all kinds of crooks! I would have fixed it myself. I just didn’t have time. I’m tired after work, understand? My back is killing me. You’ve simply worn me down with your constant complaints. According to you, if you don’t keep kicking me, I turn into a log, right?”
“I won’t do it anymore.”
She moved the heavy bag closer to the front door.
“I rented an apartment near my new office. I’ll stay there for now, and then I’ll see how things go.”
“What about me?”
All his aggression suddenly disappeared. The words seemed to become trapped somewhere in his throat.
“What do you mean, you rented an apartment? Who’s going to pay for it? Are you planning to take more money from the family budget?”
“I’ll pay for it with my new salary.”
“And what about this mortgage?”
He threw up his hands.
“My salary barely covers anything! I won’t have enough to live on if I have to pay all these bills alone.”
“I’ll continue paying my share of the debt, just as I always have.”
She looked calmly at her husband.
“You’ll pay your half. Stay here if you like. If you can’t afford it, tell me. We’ll sell the apartment and go our separate ways permanently.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
Semyon straightened up, desperately trying to regain control of the situation.
“We had a church wedding, don’t forget! You’re a woman. Your responsibility is to protect the family, not jump from one rented apartment to another. Turn down the position, forget this nonsense about traveling, and I’ll forgive you. I’ll pretend none of this ever happened. I’ll even forget about the repairman.”
Lena silently pulled the car keys from her pocket.
They belonged to the new dark-gray crossover she had bought on credit in her own name a year earlier. Banks had long refused to lend Semyon money because of his previous missed payments.
“Give me those keys.”
Semyon held out his hand when he noticed what she was doing.
“I’m not giving you the car. I need it to get to work. I can’t be expected to shake around on a bus with my sciatica.”
“You’ll take the bus, Syoma.”
She casually dropped the keys back into her pocket.
“The car is registered in my name. I make the loan payment every month. In an entire year, you haven’t even paid for the insurance once. All you’ve given me are promises.”
“I paid for gasoline!”
“Twice. Before you went fishing. The rest of the time, you drove around at my expense.”
Lena placed her hand on the door handle. A draft drifted through the stairwell, carrying the faint smell of fried potatoes from the neighbors’ apartment and the dampness of the building.
“You’ll drive into the first snowbank you see without me!”
He tried to block her way, but his attempt was uncertain and mostly for show.
“Who’s going to fill the windshield washer fluid for you? Who’s going to take the car to have the tires changed? You don’t even know the difference between the hood and the trunk!”
“I’ll go to a tire shop. Can you imagine? They have specially trained people who change tires in exchange for money. And I won’t have to beg them for three weeks.”
“Who needs you there with all your money…”
He muttered the words quietly under his breath, clearly realizing that he had lost.
“I know my place, Syoma. From now on, it’s in the department director’s chair. You can cook your own borscht. Just try not to throw the oven mitt again. There’s no one here to wash it anymore.”
The door closed softly behind her, without a theatrical slam.
Semyon remained standing in the middle of the hallway. For a long time, he stared at the empty shelf beside the mirror where the car keys had always been kept.
He could not believe that the comfortable, familiar life he had carefully constructed over the years had just walked out of the apartment carrying a single travel bag.
He shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, returned to the kitchen, picked up the discarded oven mitt, and placed it on the table.
The refrigerator contained nothing but half a pack of butter and a dried-out piece of cheese.
Three weeks passed.
Lena sat in a bright office, reviewing the branches’ quarterly reports. The leather chair was incredibly comfortable, and the view of the busy city from the window calmed her in a strange way.
The screen of her phone lit up on the desk.
An unfamiliar number appeared.
She knew exactly who it was.
Semyon called regularly from new numbers and from the phones of his garage friends because all his own numbers had long since found a permanent place on her blocked list.
At first, he had demanded money for the utility bills. Then he had asked her to return the car, at least for the weekend, so he could go and buy potatoes.
Lena rejected the call.
She placed the phone facedown and returned to the documents. There was a great deal of work, and it demanded her complete attention, but for the first time in fifteen years, the exhaustion brought her satisfaction rather than silent irritation.
The phone rang again.
This time, the screen displayed their son’s number.
“Hi, Mom.”
Danya sounded cheerful. Cars hummed in the background.
“Hello, sweetheart. How are your studies? How did your model-design project go?”
“I got the highest grade. Listen, Mom… Dad called me.”
Lena put down her pen.
“What did he want?”
“He was complaining. He said his gastritis had gotten worse from eating store-bought dumplings. He asked me to tell you to come home and cook him some soup. Chicken-breast soup. He says he’s prepared to forgive everything if you come home and give up this ridiculous career idea.”
“And what did you tell him?”
She smiled and leaned back in her chair.
“I told him he could order soup through a delivery app. Then I sent him a link. He got offended and hung up. Mom, how are you doing over there? Are you holding up?”
“I’m holding up, Danya. Everything is absolutely wonderful.”
There was a brief knock at the door.
Her assistant, Katya, looked into the office, holding a cardboard cup.
“Elena Viktorovna, your cappuccino. A courier has also delivered some documents. Could you sign for them?”
“Yes, Katya, bring them in. Danya, I’ll call you back a little later, all right?”
Lena took a sip of hot coffee.
There was not a single dissatisfied person in her new rented apartment. Her car stood in the parking lot directly beneath her window, no one changed the position of the driver’s seat, and for dinner she planned to buy herself an enormous portion of sushi rolls.
Her life was only beginning.
