The Husband Surprised Everyone With His Wedding Gift
“Petya, have you lost your mind?” Vera stared at her husband wide-eyed. “How could you do that?! How could you even think of something like this? Forgive me, but I’m starting to seriously doubt whether you have any common sense left.”
“Well, what did you expect?” he replied defiantly. “Our son doesn’t care about my opinion at all. To him, I’m nobody.”
“Oh, stop repeating that: ‘I’m nobody, he doesn’t respect me!’ He’s already twenty-four years old, and he has every right to decide for himself who he wants to live with and whom he wants to marry. The last thing we need is to choose a wife for him! We’re not living in the Middle Ages! Besides, Sabrina is a good girl. She comes from a respectable family, earns decent money, she’s smart, and she loves our son…”
“And the fact that this Sardine of yours is older than our boy doesn’t bother you?”
“Petya, that is exactly what does not bother me. What bothers me is that you fuss over Misha as though you were his mother instead of me. And our son’s fiancée is called Sabrina, not Sardine,” Vera firmly corrected her husband.
She had immediately understood that Pyotr disliked his son’s fiancée from the very first day Misha brought her home to meet his parents. The fact that Sabrina was two years older than Misha caused an almost instinctive protest in Pyotr Ivanovich.
“A man is supposed to be the head of the family. What kind of head is he if he’s young enough to be his wife’s son?” he complained indignantly.
“Don’t exaggerate, Petya,” his wife would reprimand him when he came into the kitchen, supposedly to “help take the pie out of the oven.” “You and I are the same age, and we have an equal partnership in our family. They only have a two-year age difference.”
The first conflict between Pyotr Ivanovich and his future daughter-in-law occurred a month after they met, during a celebration attended by relatives and friends of the parents. Misha and Sabrina had also been invited.
Nothing suggested that trouble was coming. Everyone ate, drank, and told amusing stories from their lives. Eventually it was Pyotr Ivanovich’s turn.
“I remember when Misha was in sixth grade, he wrote a love letter to his teacher. He asked her not to grow old and to wait until he grew up so he could marry her. And another time, during the summer, he caught a frog and kissed it, hoping it would turn into a princess,” his father enthusiastically recalled, completely ignoring his son’s embarrassment.
“Pyotr Ivanovich,” Sabrina said quietly, “I think stories like that are better shared among very close family members. Your son is already grown up, and perhaps he feels uncomfortable when his childhood adventures are discussed in front of everyone and people laugh at him.”
Pyotr Ivanovich nearly choked at what he considered her audacity. How dare she lecture him?
“So now I’m not even allowed to share memories about my own son’s childhood?” he asked, his face turning pale.
“That’s not what I meant. But your son is no longer a child, and perhaps he should decide for himself which stories about him can be told,” the young woman answered just as quietly, but firmly.
Misha, still embarrassed, tried to turn everything into a joke.
“Dad has always loved teasing me.”
But Pyotr Ivanovich was already boiling with anger. How could some outsider dare tell him what to do?
To prevent the argument from escalating, Misha and his fiancée left the party, saying they had other things to take care of.
Another dispute between Pyotr Ivanovich and Sabrina broke out during a family dinner.
“Sabrina and I have decided to start a business,” Mikhail told his parents.
His mother supported them, but his father immediately objected.
“What business? I worked so hard to get you into the company where you’re now pretending to work while earning decent money!”
“Pyotr Ivanovich, don’t you think your son has the right to decide for himself where and with whom he wants to work? We decided a long time ago that we wanted to start our own business.”
“Yes, Dad. We already have a business plan,” Misha confirmed. “I just hadn’t had a chance to tell you yet. And the job at the company gave me good starting capital, both financially and in terms of experience.”
“What kind of businessmen do you think you are? You’ll go bankrupt within a week!” his father shouted.
“Well, then that will be our experience,” Misha said with a shrug.
“How can you not see that she’s an instigator?” Pyotr complained indignantly to Vera after the young couple had left. “She’s constantly trying to turn my son against me!”
“Petya, don’t dramatize things. The girl is right. Our son is old enough not to cling to our apron strings anymore,” Vera tried to calm him down, but he remained stubborn.
“She’s undermining my authority in his eyes! At this rate, soon you’ll be taking her side too!”
“Oh, Petya, come on. Maybe she simply wants independence.”
“Independence?” Pyotr roared. “She wants to distance our son from us, and she’s constantly making me look ridiculous!”
“Well, to be fair, those childhood stories of yours… I think Misha was more embarrassed than you were.”
“You see? You’re already on her side!” He began pacing nervously around the room. “And what happens next? She’ll stop him from visiting us?”
“Stop it! She has no intention of doing anything like that. She loves our boy, and he loves her. She has absolutely no reason to quarrel with us,” Vera said, beginning to lose patience.
Her husband fell silent, but it was obvious that he was still filling his head with nonsense.
The final straw came when Misha decided to get married. At first Pyotr Ivanovich had hoped Sabrina was just another one of his son’s girlfriends, but it soon became obvious that their relationship was serious.
“Mom, Dad, Sabrina and I have filed our marriage application. We want to have the wedding outside the city,” their son announced one day when he stopped by after work without his fiancée.
More precisely, his mother had already been expecting something like this. His father, however, had not.
“Mikhail, are you joking?” His father dropped into an armchair and stared at his son. “You can’t marry that…”
“Dad! ‘That’ woman is my fiancée, and her name is Sabrina. Not Submarine, not Mackerel, not Sardine. I want you to treat my future wife with more respect!” Misha said with a frown.
Vera tried to soften the situation.
“Sweetheart, where are you going to live? At Sabrina’s place, like you do now?”
“Dad promised to give me Great-Grandmother’s one-bedroom apartment. We decided that after the wedding, we’ll sell both our apartments and buy one larger place,” Mikhail explained.
Vera praised them for being practical, and their son left without paying much attention to his father’s strange reaction.
“Petya, are you out of your mind?” Vera was speechless when, several days later, her husband told her that he had sold his grandmother’s apartment—the one he had promised to their son.
“Why are you talking like that?” Pyotr Ivanovich asked in surprise. “I can do whatever I want with it! You know, recently I was sitting and thinking about my youth… I remembered how my mother often looked at the stars and dreamed that someday scientists would find a way to send tourists into space. And I realized that I never did anything for my mother. She raised me alone, fed me, looked after me, protected me, and I couldn’t even fulfill one of her dreams. So I bought her a tourist trip into the future.”
“Where?” Vera whispered in horror, her heart sinking.
“Into space,” Pyotr Ivanovich announced happily. “The company ‘Scam Travel’ lowered the prices for its tours. Mom is going to be so happy!”
Vera had no choice but to call their son and her mother-in-law and invite them over for a serious conversation.
“Dad, are you serious? You sold the apartment you promised me?” Misha was stunned. He couldn’t understand how an adult man who ran a successful business and was respected in his social circle could simply throw away several million rubles on a nonexistent tour sold by scammers.
“Petya, son, did you hit your head?” gasped his eighty-two-year-old mother. “I’m afraid to go higher than the third floor! I need heart drops just to ride the escalator at the shopping mall, and you want to send me into space? Couldn’t you simply wait until I died? How could you make such a fool of yourself?”
“Mom, I wanted to make you happy,” Pyotr said, offended that nobody appreciated his generous present.
His son being upset was understandable, of course. But in Pyotr’s opinion, it served him right. They had been counting their chickens before they hatched. Next time Misha would think twice about how he spoke to his father—and teach that flighty woman of his some respect too.
“Well, congratulations. You proved that you’re the boss!” Misha said with a bitter smile. “Now you can be proud of yourself.”
He left, quietly closing the door behind him.
“Son, you’ve disappointed me,” Pyotr’s mother said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what came over you, but you should see a doctor. No sane person would do something like this.”
She too left without saying goodbye.
“Do you understand that your unreasonable hatred toward your son’s fiancée has destroyed our family?” Vera sat in the kitchen with her head lowered in despair.
Then she looked at her husband the way one might look at some unfamiliar object that had mysteriously appeared in the room, wondering how it had gotten there.
“I can’t stand looking at you,” she said as she got to her feet. “I’m going to stay with my mother for a while.”
Vera packed some of her belongings and left the house.
Pyotr remained alone in the empty apartment.
At first he was furious. His wife had not supported him, his mother had called him foolish, and his son had barely even spoken to him.
Then, little by little, he began to understand what he had actually done.
Because of his stupid pride and arrogance, he had lost not only the apartment and the money, but also his family’s trust—and their confidence in his sanity.
Loneliness, though not immediately, brought him to his senses. Pyotr Ivanovich finally looked at the situation from another perspective: the perspective of the people he loved.
“Idiot! Stubborn old egoist!” he groaned several days later, clutching his head.
And then he made a decision.
Music was playing in the banquet hall, and the guests were congratulating the newlyweds.
Pyotr Ivanovich felt like a stranger at the celebration, but he gathered all his courage and approached his son and his bride. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Vera watching him cautiously.
“She’s afraid I’m going to cause another scene,” he realized.
“Mikhail, Sabrina,” the groom’s father began, his voice trembling, “forgive me.”
He held out an envelope.
His son looked suspiciously at the gift and hesitated to take it.
Sabrina smiled, accepted the envelope instead, and looked inside.
Her face lit up with surprise.
A set of apartment keys fell from the envelope into her palm.
“It’s not Grandma’s apartment, but it’s just as good,” Pyotr said with satisfaction.
“Kiss! Kiss!” the guests began chanting.
“Petya, where did you get the money for an apartment?” Vera quietly asked her husband, genuinely astonished.
“I’m not completely out of my mind. I didn’t spend all the money from Grandma’s apartment. Besides, I’d been quietly saving money for our son’s wedding for a long time,” he admitted shyly.
Pleased with the effect he had produced, he put his arm around his wife.
The family was reunited, although for a long time afterward everyone still kept a cautious eye on Pyotr Ivanovich, afraid that something in his head might short-circuit again.
