“Starting on the first, you’ll pay for your own apartment yourself,” I said, placing a folder containing seven years’ worth of utility bills in front of my mother-in-law.
“I’ve put up with you here for seven years! My house, my rules!”
Oksana placed the ladle on its rest and turned around. Her mother-in-law stood in the kitchen doorway, dressed to the nines, an enamel dragonfly brooch pinned to the collar of her elegant blouse. It was Sunday, and guests had come for lunch. They were already taking their seats around the large table in the living room.
“The soup is getting cold, Valentina Yegorovna,” Oksana said. “Shall I serve it?”
“Serve it, serve it! Just don’t fill the bowls to the brim again. This is my special tablecloth!”
Oksana turned back to the stove. In seven years, she had learned this house by heart: the exact temperature at which her mother-in-law liked her soup—“hot enough, but not so hot it burns my tongue, and not like dishwater either.”
She had learned everything.
There was only one lesson she had never learned: to remain silent in response.
The guests were already seated at the table: her mother-in-law’s sister Ninel and her husband, the downstairs neighbor, and Valentina’s own son—Oksana’s husband, Tolik. Tolik sat at the end of the table in a new shirt, intently studying the label on a bottle of mineral water as though it contained the secret of the universe.
“Tolya, help me slice the bread,” Oksana called from the kitchen.
“Let him sit! He’s worked hard all week!” her mother-in-law snapped. “You can do it yourself. You’re younger.”
Tolik gratefully lowered his eyes back to the bottle.
Oksana sliced the bread.
She was counting.
That was her profession—counting.
The utilities for this three-bedroom apartment came to eight thousand rubles a month, and she had paid them from the very first day. Groceries were her responsibility too. The renovations in two rooms—the bedroom and the living room, where the guests were now sitting and admiring the wallpaper—had also been paid for by her. One hundred and eighty thousand rubles, three years ago. She had saved the money by working two extra jobs.
At the time, her mother-in-law had said, “At least you’re good for something.”
“Eat, everyone, eat!” Valentina Yegorovna commanded as she moved around the table. “Ninusya, shall I serve you some more? I’m the one holding everything together. I support everyone all by myself. My pension is small, but the family is large.”
Oksana placed the soup tureen on the table and sat in her usual place—at the very edge, opposite Tolik.
Ninel, Valentina’s sister, was a deliberate, serious woman. She tasted the soup and nodded approvingly.
“Delicious. Valya, you’ve finally learned how to cook.”
“I didn’t make it. She did,” her mother-in-law said, jerking her head toward Oksana as though reporting a faulty faucet. “At least she does something. They’ve been living here with everything handed to them for seven years, and they’ve never even thanked their mother!”
The table fell silent.
The downstairs neighbor delicately reached for the salt.
“With everything handed to us,” Oksana repeated quietly.
“Of course!” Valentina Yegorovna raised her voice, turning toward the guests as though summoning witnesses. “Just look at her! I’ve supported them for seven years! The roof over their heads is mine! The rules are mine! And she still dares to look me in the eye!”
Tolik looked up from the bottle for exactly one second.
The man of the house, who had spent the entire meal performing an act entitled “I’m Not Here,” now switched to another one called “I’m Just Eating My Soup.”
“Mom, not at the table,” he muttered into his bowl.
“What do you mean, not at the table?! The truth can be told at the table!” His mother was fully worked up now, and the dragonfly brooch trembled on her chest. “Remember this, Oksana: my house, my rules. Don’t like it? The door is right there! But where would you even go, huh? You don’t have a thing to your name! You haven’t even managed to have children in seven years. All you do is work, work, work!”
Oksana put down her spoon.
Straight and even, beside the plate.
“Children,” she said.
“What about children?! You’ll be forty-six soon, and still nothing!” her mother-in-law continued triumphantly, sensing that she had struck a nerve. “Other women your age are already looking after grandchildren, while you…”
Oksana looked at her calmly.
Then she pushed back her chair, stood up, and walked into the hallway.
The guests exchanged glances.
Her mother-in-law looked around the table victoriously, as if to say, See? She ran away. She has nothing to answer with.
Oksana returned a minute later.
She was carrying a thin folder.
She placed it on the table beside the soup tureen and opened it.
“What’s that supposed to be?” Valentina Yegorovna asked warily.
“Mortgage approval,” Oksana said. “A two-bedroom apartment in a new development on Ternovskogo Street. We paid the down payment last week. We get the keys in a month.”
Silence settled over the room.
Ninel quietly put down her fork and moved it to the edge of her plate.
“We’re moving out on the first,” Oksana continued in the same calm, matter-of-fact tone she had used only moments earlier when asking Tolik to slice the bread. “And starting on the first, you’ll pay the utilities yourself, Valentina Yegorovna. Your apartment, your bills.”
“But I… How can…?” her mother-in-law stammered. “Eight thousand rubles? Every month?”
“Eight thousand two hundred last month. The heating rates went up.”
Oksana removed a neatly clipped stack of bills from the folder.
“These cover the past seven years. Every one of them has been paid. Look at the payer’s signature. It’s the same on every bill. Yours isn’t on a single one.”
She placed the bills on top of the folder.
Valentina Yegorovna reached out—not for the bills, but for the back of her chair.
She gripped it.
Then she slowly lowered herself back into her seat, though only a second earlier she had begun to rise, ready to restore order at her table.
“You… You did this deliberately! In front of everyone!” she finally forced out.
“No,” Oksana said. “You started it in front of everyone. I merely continued.”
The downstairs neighbor suddenly became very hurried.
“Oh, Valentina, I have to run. I left something on the stove… Thank you for lunch.”
Ninel stood up next and adjusted her cardigan.
“We should go too, Gena,” she said to her husband.
Silent Gena, who had spent the entire meal concentrating on eating pickles and staying out of the conversation, nodded, finished chewing, and got to his feet.
At the door, he turned toward Valentina while fastening his jacket and quietly remarked:
“But you really weren’t the one paying the utilities, Valya. I remember you bragging that your daughter-in-law covered everything.”
Then he left.
Tolik remained seated, clutching the mineral-water bottle.
His status as “online” never activated that day.
“You knew,” Oksana said to him.
It wasn’t a question.
“Oksana, well, I… Mom, you know…” Tolik swallowed. “I thought it would sort itself out.”
“It has,” Oksana said. “In one month.”
She gathered the folder from the table.
Her mother-in-law remained seated, staring at the cooling soup tureen.
She did not say another word that day about “supporting her son’s family.”
The remaining month passed in a strangely quiet manner.
Valentina Yegorovna tried approaching the situation from another angle. On the second day, she looked into the room where Oksana was packing books and began lamenting.
“Oksanochka, darling, why are you rushing away like this? What about my heart? I’ll be left alone—old and sick! Who will bring me a glass of water?”
“Arrange for a social worker,” Oksana said without looking up from the box. “Or Tolik can visit you. He is your precious Tolechka, after all.”
“Precious Tolechka!” Her mother-in-law’s tone changed instantly. “Do you hear how she speaks about your son? You snake! I took a snake into my home! And what about the renovations? What are you going to do with the wallpaper? Take it to your new home with you?”
“I’ll leave the wallpaper,” Oksana said. “Enjoy it. Free of charge.”
Her mother-in-law slammed the door so hard that the glasses in the cabinet rattled.
A week later, just before the move, Oksana accidentally overheard Valentina Yegorovna speaking to a friend on the phone in the kitchen. Her mother-in-law had the phone on speaker because, as she put it, “I can’t hear properly through the earpiece, and my hands are covered in dough.”
Her voice was sugary and wounded, clearly intended for an audience.
“…I did everything myself, Lyusya! I paid the utilities and bought all the groceries! And now they’re moving out, the ungrateful creatures, abandoning me here alone! I even paid for their renovations and put up expensive Finnish wallpaper!”
Oksana entered the kitchen and picked up her mug from the windowsill.
Her mother-in-law saw her and stopped midsentence, but she did not turn off the speakerphone.
“The ‘Finnish’ wallpaper cost two hundred and eighty rubles per roll from the Pyaterochka across the street,” Oksana said quietly, but loudly enough for the woman on the phone to hear. “I put it up myself. I can find the receipt if necessary.”
Then she walked out.
They moved on the first, just as Oksana had promised.
Tolik rushed about aimlessly. One minute he loaded boxes into the car; the next he sat on them and sighed. Then he called his mother and said, “Well, hang in there.”
Oksana carried the boxes herself.
Their new two-bedroom apartment was completed on schedule.
Two weeks after the move, the former downstairs neighbor—the same one who had fled from the lunch table—called Oksana. Oksana had been giving her a recipe for aspic, and they got to talking.
“Your Valentina,” the neighbor reported, lowering her voice, “has become completely miserable. She received her first utility bill and came running to me, waving the paper around. ‘What is this? Is everything really this expensive? Do I have to pay this every month?’ I said, ‘What did you think, Valya?’ She sat down on the bench outside the building and stayed there for half an hour. I walked past later, and she was still sitting there.”
Tolik called twice.
The first time, he complained that his mother was making him pay for her water and electricity meters and that “it was hard for her to manage alone.”
The second time, he cautiously asked, “So, what time are we having dinner?”
Oksana replied that she ate dinner whenever she wanted and hung up.
According to the same neighbor, Ninel’s husband Gena now brought up the story of the utility bills at every family gathering. Valentina Yegorovna no longer dared to mention at the table that she had “supported her son’s family.”
In the hallway of her new apartment, Oksana took an electric screwdriver out of her bag and held a coat hook against the wall.
She positioned it at the height of her own hand—not her mother-in-law’s.
Then she drove in the first screw.
