Vera dropped by her younger sister’s place with a pie and spotted her husband’s shirt hanging on the drying rack in the bathroom. It was unmistakable—the one with the button sewn on with green thread. She didn’t say a word. Vera decided to find out first just how much she was being lied to, and by whom.
I held the pie with both hands because the baking dish was hot even through the towel. And there it was, a sky blue striped shirt hanging over the tub on the drying rack, and on its left cuff was a button sewn with green thread.
Green, because I had run out of white thread back then.
I set the dish on top of the washing machine. Right on the lid, even though Nelli always scolds me that the heat leaves marks. My hands automatically reached for the sleeve, but I pulled them back, as if the fabric were damp for some other reason.
— Vera, where are you? The kettle’s boiled!
My sister’s voice had that bright, lifting lilt, like she had spent her whole life calling out to someone from a balcony. I turned on the water in the sink, just so there would be some noise.
— Just washing my hands.
— Use the blue towel, that pink one’s for the face!
The blue towel was hanging right next to the shirt. I dried my hands and looked at my reflection in the mirror above the sink: forty-one years old, light brown hair pulled into a low ponytail, a mole below my left eye—Gena used to call it my ‘dot.’ My face looked normal. There was nothing written on it, and for some reason that surprised me most of all.
In Nelli’s kitchen, it smelled like cinnamon and fresh paint. I didn’t pay much attention to the paint. Not back then.
— What’s with you?—my sister asked, setting a mug with a giraffe in front of me.—High blood pressure?
— Everything’s fine.
— Yeah, I can see how ‘fine’ you are. Your chin goes like this—she jutted her jaw and made dramatic eyes.—Mom used to look like that when Dad spent his salary at the garage.
I laughed. The laugh was short and dry, like flipping a switch. Nelli laughed too and turned to the stove, where nothing was actually cooking.
She’s thirty-six. Dark bob haircut, bangs down to her brows, and a thin scar on her right hand from a burn, way back when she was seven and I, at twelve, was cooking us pasta and knocked over the pot. The scar is pale, hardly visible. But I always see it.
— What’s in the pie?—she asked.
— Cabbage. Mom’s recipe.
— Oh, that’s it. You’re a saint.
I cut her a piece. Watched her eat, quickly, biting off almost half at once, and tried to figure out if she knew I had seen. If she knew, maybe she wouldn’t eat like that. Or maybe she would eat exactly like that. How should I know how someone eats when she’s sleeping with her sister’s husband?
I thought the word to myself for the first time. And immediately choked on my tea.
— Too hot?—Nelli moved the sugar bowl over.
— Hot.
— By the way, my pipe burst here two weeks ago. The neighbors downstairs were yelling, the repairman came.
— What kind of repairman?
She looked up at me. Just for a second, but I caught the little twitch in her left eyebrow—the one she over-plucked as a kid to look like a movie star.
— What kind? Just the usual. From the management office.
— And he left his shirt here?
I hadn’t meant to say it. It just slipped out, the way things suddenly fall out of the closet after being stuffed in too long.
Nelli placed her piece of pie on a plate. Carefully, crust side down.
— What shirt?
— In the bathroom. The blue one.
— Oh, that. — She stood up, opened the fridge, and stared inside for a long time. — That belongs to Timur. From work. He helped me assemble a wardrobe and spilled something on himself.
— Timur’s?
— Yeah. You don’t know him.
I didn’t know any Timur. But I did know that green-threaded button, because I sewed it on myself back in March, sitting on the couch watching a series, and Gena even said, “Who even pays attention to cuffs, Vera?” The thread came from Grandma’s sewing box, the one full of buttons from all our childhood coats.
I finished my tea. Got up. I said I had an appointment with the dentist at four, even though my appointment was actually on Friday.
— Take half of the pie with you, — Nelly said. — I won’t eat it all by myself.
— Just leave it.
— Vera.
— What?
She stood in the kitchen doorway, holding a towel like she was about to cover her face with it.
— Nothing. Call me when you get home.
I walked down from the fifth floor, even though the elevator was working.
Gena wasn’t home. He had messaged that he’d be at the site until eight, and I reread that message five times, as if I might find a hidden letter in the words ‘at the site’ that I’d missed before.
Gennady Sergeevich Boyko, forty-four years old, foreman at Monolit-Yug construction company. Six foot one, broad-shouldered, receding at the temples, missing half a fingernail on his right ring finger—slammed it in the Gazelle door before we got married. Nineteen years together. Our son Danya is studying in Tomsk and calls every Sunday.
I stood in the entryway in my jacket, not knowing what to do next.
His garage keys were lying on the hall stand. Next to them were his reading glasses, one arm wrapped in electrical tape. Everything looked so normal, so ordinary, I just wanted to sit down on the floor.
I opened the wardrobe. His shirts hung by color: that’s how I sort them, though he just grabs whichever. White, gray, plaid, two dark blue ones. The blue striped one was missing.
When was the last time I saw it?
I started trying to remember, like I was taking a test. Washed it at the end of August. Ironed it. He wore it to Somov’s birthday, in the twenties. And then… And then I didn’t remember. At all. As if the shirt just walked out of the house with him and never came back.
It wasn’t in the laundry basket either. I dug through everything, down to the bottom, even found a pair of my old tights someone had tossed in, though I’d have thrown them out ages ago.
When the front door slammed, I was sitting on the edge of the tub with one of his socks in my hand.
— What’re you doing here? — Gena peeked in, still in his jacket, carrying a bag from Magnit. — Looking for something?
— A sock without its pair.
— Oh. The washing machine eats those all the time.
He smelled like concrete dust and something else. I couldn’t tell what. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe I imagined it, standing there in the bathroom clutching a lone sock like an idiot.
— Are you going to eat dinner?
— Yeah. By the way, I drove past Nelly’s place today, — he said as he was walking into the kitchen. — Half the street’s dug up over there.
I froze with the sock in my hand.
Why did he say that? On his own. Without me asking.
— What were you doing there?
— Oh, work stuff, in that area. — He rustled the bag. — Vera, where’s the sour cream? I bought some on Thursday.
The sour cream was on the second shelf. I got it out and put it in front of him and sat across the table, while he cut thick slices of bread, like he likes, ‘so it doesn’t get eaten up too fast.’
— I was at Nelly’s today.
“Yeah? How is she doing?”
“Her pipe burst.”
“Well,” he said, “it happens.”
He shoved a piece of bread into his mouth. Chewed for a long time. Stared at the TV where the weather forecast was on, even though he had never cared about the weather in his life.
I couldn’t sleep that night. Gena was snoring on his back, one arm sprawled across my pillow, and I lay right on the edge of the bed so his arm wouldn’t touch me.
At three in the morning, I went to the kitchen to get some water. I poured a glass, brought it to my lips, but set it back down on the table. The water trembled. I stared at it the way you look into a well.
Nelli. Nellka. The one I used to take to kindergarten because her mom worked double shifts at the bread factory. The one I gave my white boots to for graduation, because she didn’t have any and I was already in college and had other boots. The one who cried in my kitchen when Oleg left her, three years ago, and slept on this couch for two weeks.
And Gena brought her a blanket. I remember. I thought to myself back then: how caring he is.
His phone was charging in the hallway. I knew the password, Dani’s year of birth, he never changed it. I stood barefoot by the nightstand with my hands behind my back.
No. Not like this.
If I open this phone, I’ll become someone who opens other people’s phones. My mom checked my dad’s pockets and sniffed his scarves all her life. Nellka and I saw it. We swore, sitting on the staircase, that we would never be like that.
I went back to bed. Lay on the edge. The alarm clock read 3:18, then 4:02, and I must have finally fallen asleep because I woke up to the smell of coffee.
Gena was at the stove in a tank-top, frying eggs. He does this about once every six months, on some inner schedule no one else knows.
“Did you sleep well? You were tossing all night.”
“I had some dreams or something.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“I don’t remember.”
He placed a plate in front of me. Eggs with tomatoes, just how I like, not with sausage the way he likes. I looked at it and couldn’t pick up my fork.
Why is he doing this? What is he apologizing for?
Mom called at eleven, when I was already at work and redoing the same invoice for the third time.
Zinaida Pavlovna, sixty-eight years old, former bread factory technologist, lives alone in a two-room apartment on Sadovaya. Her voice is high-pitched, and every sentence starts with “well now.”
“Well now, tell me, Vera, where are my electric bills?”
“Mom, they’re in the sideboard. In the blue folder.”
“Well now, they’re not there. I checked.”
“Check again.”
“Well now, Gena would find them. He found them last time.”
I put my pen down.
“When was the last time?”
“Well, when he came over. Saturday, I think. Or Friday. With Nelli.”
“With Nelli?”
“Well now, I don’t remember, Vera, what am I, a calendar? They came, changed the light bulb in the bathroom for me, he also said the socket needs to be fixed or else I’ll burn down the place. Well now, when are you coming to see me?”
I didn’t know Gena had been to mom’s place. He never told me. Neither did Nelli.
“On the weekend, Mom.”
“Well now, you always say that.”
She hung up. Didn’t even say goodbye, as usual. Lately, she often does that, and I chalked it up to her personality.
I was bent over the invoice, doing the calculations. Gena’s Saturdays are work days every other week. That Saturday, he said he had a handover at a house on Kirova. I was making borscht and waiting for him around six, but he showed up at nine and said everything had gone wrong—they had to redo the whole thing.
The lightbulb in Mom’s bathroom. The outlet.
Why together? Why didn’t you say a word to me?
Larisa from the neighboring office poked her head in with a mug.
“Vera, when’s your lunch break? Let’s hit the cafeteria, they’ve got stuffed cabbage rolls today.”
“Don’t feel like it.”
“You look a little green. Are you feeling sick?”
Larisa is fifty-two, with curly red hair and a way of talking like she already knows everything about you. She set a toffee on my desk, like I was a little kid, and left.
I unwrapped the toffee. It stuck to my teeth, and I kept trying to peel it off with my tongue because I just couldn’t hold onto any thoughts anymore.
On Friday, I headed to Nelli’s place without calling first.
I told myself I was bringing her that jar of jam I’d promised all the way back in September. The jar rattled in my bag and jabbed me with every bump as I walked from the bus stop, past the dug-up street and the shawarma kiosk.
She didn’t open the door right away. I rang the bell and heard footsteps behind the door, then silence, then footsteps again.
“Vera?” Nelli was in an old hoodie that belonged to her dad, covered in white dust. “Why didn’t you call?”
“Brought you some jam.”
“Oh. Well, come in.”
She didn’t step aside from the door. She stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on her jeans, and I could see newspapers spread out on the hallway floor, and from the far room—the one that used to be her office—came a banging sound.
Banging.
“Is someone here with you?”
“The handyman. I told you already. The plumbing isn’t done yet.”
“Timur?”
Nelli blinked.
“Who?”
“You know, Timur. The one who built your wardrobe.”
“Oh. No. It’s someone else.”
The banging stopped. I heard someone cough—a short one, into a fist. I’ve heard that cough every morning for nineteen years, when he gets up and goes to smoke on the balcony, even though he quit, even though he promised.
I set my bag down on the floor. The jar clinked against the tile.
“Gena,” I said, my voice steady. “Come out.”
The apartment went so quiet I could hear the neighbors’ TV murmuring upstairs. Nelli lowered her hands. Her fingers fidgeted, searching for something to grip, and found her own elbow.
He came out. In a grey t-shirt, work pants, holding a screwdriver. There was a white streak on his cheek, like an Indian in one of those movies we watched with Dania when he was little.
“Vera,” he said. “Listen… Don’t get the wrong idea.”
“And what should I think?”
“I’m helping Nelli. Just some repairs.”
“During work hours?”
He looked at Nelli. She looked back at him. That glance—quick, like passing keys from one hand to another—I’ll remember forever.
“Vera, let’s go to the kitchen,” Nelli said. “Let’s sit down. I’ll explain everything.”
“Explain it here.”
“There are newspapers here.”
“I don’t care about the newspapers.”
But still, I went. I don’t know why. Maybe because my legs felt foreign, and sitting was just easier than standing.
In the kitchen, Nelli poured me a glass of water. I didn’t drink it. Gena sat on a stool by the window and put the screwdriver on his knees like a rifle.
“I got laid off,” he said.
I didn’t understand. Honestly, I didn’t get it at first—I thought it was some kind of handyman term, like trimming a pipe, cutting off the extra.
“In July,” he said. “Monolit shut down almost the whole area. They left two people. I wasn’t one of them.”
“In July,” I repeated.
“Yeah.”
“So where do you go? Every morning. At seven.”
He rubbed his forehead. The white dust just smeared even more.
“To private jobs. Repairs. Tile, plumbing, welding things. There’s an ad here, a friend there.”
“And the money?”
“I bring it home, don’t I?”
He did bring it. Every month, just like before. I never looked at his pay slips, I didn’t even know they could be paper. We lived off the card, and the money always appeared on the card.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Gena was silent. Nelli stood by the sink, turning the tap back and forth, without running the water.
“Because you’d have said exactly what you told your father,” he finally said. “Remember? When he left the factory. ‘A man who doesn’t provide for his family isn’t a man, he’s just a lodger.’”
I remembered that. I was twenty-three, my father was sitting on this stool in my mom’s kitchen, and I stood in the doorway, so young and so sure of myself. I said it. And after that my father didn’t talk to me for six months, and then he died of a heart attack, and we never really finished that argument.
I never told Gena the whole story. Just that phrase, once, laughing, as if it was just some funny memory. He remembered.
“What about the shirt?” I asked.
“What shirt?”
“The blue one. It was hanging in the bathroom.”
“I was replacing a pipe here, got splashed. Nelly washed it.” He looked straight at me for the first time during this whole conversation. “Vera. What did you think?”
I didn’t answer. My sister turned off the tap, even though it was already off.
“She thought,” Nelli said quietly, “that there’s something between us.”
“Oh, come on,” said Gena. He laughed. And then stopped, because I didn’t laugh.
I got up and went to the bathroom. Locked the door. The shirt wasn’t on the drying rack, just Nelli’s towels and some rag. I sat on the edge of the bathtub and stared at my knees.
Layoffs. Odd jobs. Replacing a pipe.
It all made sense. Nothing was scary anymore, and I could walk out, hug him, say: you silly man, why didn’t you tell me, we could have handled it. I even started to stand up.
And then I saw the handrail.
New, shiny, screwed into the wall above the bathtub at hip height. Another, smaller one, by the sink. And a rubber mat with bumps on the tub floor, the kind you get for elderly people so they don’t slip.
Why would Nelli need handrails at thirty-six?
I didn’t ask anything. I came out and said I was going home, that I needed to think. Gena stood up, wanted to come with me, and I told him not to. He sat back down.
The whole way on the bus, I couldn’t stop thinking about that handrail. Seven stops, then a walk through the courtyard past the pharmacy, and the image of that shiny bar stayed in my mind the whole time, like a spoon at the bottom of the sink.
At home I made soup. Just to keep my hands busy. Onion, carrot, potato cubed small, cutting them the way my mom did, the knife chopping on the board, and in that sound there was something like an answer.
Gena came at eight. He stood in the kitchen doorway.
“Want soup?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
We ate in silence. He blew on his spoon, even though the soup was already cold. I watched his ring finger, left with only half a nail, and thought: maybe I never really knew this man. Or if I did, maybe he wasn’t the one I knew.
“Ver,” he said. “Did you really think that?”
“I did.”
“About Nelly.”
“About Nelly.”
He set his spoon down. He looked up at me, and in his eyes was something I had never seen in nineteen years. Not hurt, exactly. A kind of weariness, like someone who has carried a heavy sack for a long time and only now realized he could have just put it down.
“I couldn’t have done it,” he said. “You know that.”
I knew. Deep down, I’d always known, from the very first moment. But I saw the button hanging by a green thread, and what I saw was stronger than what I felt inside.
“So what about the handrails?” I asked.
Gena looked away. Picked up the spoon. Set it back down.
“Ask Nelly about that.”
“I’m asking you.”
“Ver. I promised her.”
“Another promise? How many did you two make each other?”
He got up, put his plate in the sink, and went into the other room. I heard him turn on the TV. Some soccer game, the roar of the crowd, a whistle.
I finished washing the dishes. Wiped the table. There was a faint ring from his mug on the countertop, and I scrubbed at it with a sponge until it disappeared, and then kept scrubbing a little longer.
Nelly hadn’t answered her phone in two days.
On the third day, I went to my mom’s. Saturday, ten in the morning, raining, I’d forgotten my umbrella and stood under the awning of the building on Sadovaya, brushing drops off my sleeves.
Mom opened the door in her robe, worn inside out. The seams were on the outside.
“And here’s Vera. I waited for you on Thursday, you know.”
“I called to say I’d come on Saturday.”
“You didn’t call.”
I didn’t argue. Went to the kitchen. There was a pot on the stove, and the gas was burning underneath it with a blue flame, but the pot was empty. Completely empty. The bottom was already getting dark.
I turned off the gas. My hands were steady. I remember later being surprised at just how steady they were.
“Mom, what were you cooking?”
“Buckwheat. Didn’t you see where I put the buckwheat?”
The buckwheat was in the fridge. Still in the package, unopened, next to the kefir. I stared at it and couldn’t close the fridge door.
In the hallway, on the cabinet, there was a note pinned under some keys. Nelly’s handwriting, big and slanting backward. “Mom! Did you check the gas? Did you lock the door? Did you take your 9 o’clock pill? If you need anything, call NELLY.” And her number. Her number, written out again, even though it’s the first button on Mom’s phone.
My number wasn’t written there.
I sat on the stool in the hallway, right on top of mom’s slippers.
“Mom. How long have you been keeping buckwheat in the fridge?”
“Why are you picking on me?” She adjusted her robe. “Nelly says the same. Nelly took me to the clinic. To that, that neurologist. And you know, Vera, he’s so young, but he keeps asking: what year is it, what date is it. Do I look stupid to you?”
“When did she take you?”
“Back in the summer. It was hot. Gena drove us, in the car.”
In the summer. July. When Gena got laid off and was driving my mom to the neurologist, while telling me he was at the work site.
I dialed Nelly. She didn’t answer. I called again and listened to the rings, looking at Mom’s robe with the seams outside, and on the eighth ring my sister answered.
“Vera, I’m at work.”
“I’m at mom’s.”
Pause. I could hear carts rumbling where she was, and someone laughing in the background.
“The gas was on,” I said. “Under an empty pot.”
“Oh God.” Nelly’s voice cracked in the middle of the word. “Did you turn it off?”
“I turned it off.”
“I’ll be there in an hour. Don’t leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She arrived forty minutes later—soaked, no umbrella, just like me. By then, Mom had gone to sleep in the middle of the day, which she never used to do. We sat in her kitchen, perched on stools Dad made himself out of birch wood—one of them still wobbles to this day.
“Since spring,” Nelli said before I could even ask. “At first it was little things. Keys in the breadbox. Then she called me at two in the morning and asked why I wasn’t home from school yet.”
“From school.”
“I must have sounded like I was ten years old to her. She was waiting for me to come home from school.”
I stared at the scar on her arm. Pale, almost invisible.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Nell?”
Nelli laughed. It wasn’t a good laugh—soft, into her palm.
“Ver. I did tell you. In May. Don’t you remember?”
I didn’t remember.
“I called you, told you Mom was acting strange, said let’s go to the doctor together. And you said…” She looked up at me. “You said, ‘Nell, it’s just her age. Don’t make a fuss. And if anything, it’s not up to me—I’ve got Dania’s exams, I’ve got work, I’m not your babysitter. There are places for this sort of thing.’”
That’s what I said. I remembered. I was by the stove, frying cutlets, holding the phone between my shoulder and ear, and I was busy. I was always too busy when it came to Mom. Mom was complicated, she nitpicked me my whole life, she always loved Nell more—everybody knew it. And I said ‘places for this’ because it sounded reasonable, grown-up. Then I hung up and flipped the cutlets.
“What about Gena?” I asked.
“Gena called me a week later. Himself. Asked what was going on with Mom. I told him, sobbing into the phone like an idiot. He said: let’s go to the doctor together. I said: you’ve got work. He said: we’ll manage.”
“And you managed.”
“We managed. Then he got laid off and told me: don’t tell Vera, I’ll handle it. I said: and you don’t tell her about Mom either, she’ll just say I’m making a fuss.”
I pictured both of them in that hot July corridor at the clinic, sitting on plastic chairs, Mom in the middle. Gena holding a folder with test results. Nelli holding Mom’s hand. And me, far away, at work, tallying invoices and snacking on Lariska’s toffees.
“Handrails,” I said.
“I’m taking her to live with me.” Nelli straightened on the wobbly stool. “I’m turning my office into her room. The doctor said soon she can’t be left alone. Gena’s doing all the work. I pay him, like a contractor, at first he wouldn’t take it but I made him—he needs to bring something home. He jokes: I’m on a contract for my sister-in-law.”
“You’re paying my husband to bring me his paycheck.”
“Well… I guess I am.”
I wanted to be angry. I really did—I even drew in a breath. But instead, my lips started to tremble and I covered my mouth with my hand, just like Mom used to do when Dad upset her. Turns out, I do it too.
Nelli scooted closer. The stool creaked. She rested her head on my shoulder, just like when we were little and shared a bed because the other room was too cold.
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Ver. I’m just so tired of explaining everything.”
“And the shirt?” I asked, speaking into her hair.
“What about the shirt?”
“Why did you say it was Timur’s?”
She pulled away and looked at me. Then suddenly burst out in girlish giggles, right to tears.
— I don’t know! I panicked! The way you looked at me, it was like I’d killed someone. The first name that popped into my head was Timur. Timur from HR, the sixty-year-old in suspenders.
I started laughing too. There we sat, two soaked women on our father’s old stools, laughing uncontrollably, while Mom slept in the next room in her robe, worn inside out. It wasn’t funny at all, not one bit, but we just couldn’t stop.
I came home by evening. Gena was in the kitchen fixing Mom’s toaster, the one she gave him “for good” back in the spring. I had no idea the toaster was at our place.
He was wearing glasses with electrical tape around the arm.
— I was at Mom’s, I said.
He looked up. His screwdriver stopped mid-air.
— And at Nelly’s too.
— Well, he said. — So now you know.
— I know.
He took off his glasses and set them on the table, right next to the little screws he had lined up on the newspaper from biggest to smallest. He always did that. For nineteen years, I’d watched him arrange screws and never once asked why.
— Why do you set them out like that? I asked.
— What?
— The screws. By size.
He looked down at the newspaper. As if he was seeing it for the first time, too.
— So I can put them back in the same order. Otherwise, you always end up with extras.
— And if you do end up with extras?
— Then I put it together wrong.
I took off my jacket. Hung it over the back of the chair. Sat down across from him.
— Gena. Back in May, I told Nelly about the special places. About Mom.
— I know.
— She told you?
— No. You told me yourself. That evening. You laughed about Nelly always making a drama out of things.
I didn’t remember it. At all. Just like I didn’t remember what happened to the blue shirt after Somov’s birthday. Like Mom can’t remember buckwheat.
How much of what I’ve said have I forgotten myself?
— Why didn’t you ever say anything? To me.
He fidgeted with the tiniest screw between his fingers.
— What was I supposed to say, Vera? You would’ve dug in your heels. When you’re stubborn, not even a crane can move you. I thought: let it go. We’ll handle it quietly, and you’ll see for yourself later. After all, she’s your mom.
— And you handled the job quietly too.
— The job too. — He sighed. — That one’s on me. I was scared. Thought I’d find a decent one by New Year’s, tell you I switched jobs, like it had always been that way.
— Tenant, I said.
He flinched. Deep, his whole body, from the shoulders down.
— I didn’t mean it how it sounded — I leaned across the table towards him. — Back then, to Dad. I said it wrong, Gena. I was twenty-three, thought I knew everything. Then he died, and I never apologized. And you’ve carried that phrase for nineteen years like…
I didn’t finish. Couldn’t find the words. Like a stone in your pocket that you forget to take out, and after a while you don’t notice it anymore, but it weighs you down.
Gena took my hand. His palm was rough, covered in small cuts from tile, and smelled of motor oil and laundry soap.
— Silly girl, he said.
And that was it. He didn’t say another word.
But that night, I couldn’t sleep again.
I lay on my side of the bed staring at the ceiling, where a strip of light from the street lamp trembled. Gena slept on his side, turned toward the wall, quiet, not even snoring, as if even in his sleep he was trying not to disturb me.
Everything was decided. Mom would move in with Nelly. Gena would finish the renovations. Then he’d look for work, and I’d help — Larisa’s brother works at the management company and they’re always looking for good men. Everything was right, everything in its place.
So why did it still hurt so much inside?
I got up and went to the bathroom. Turned on the light – it flickered, just like always, twice before staying on. In the mirror, there I was: forty-one, a mole under my eye, eyelids puffy.
On the washing machine was a stack of his things, the ones he must’ve brought from Nelli. On top, neatly folded, was a blue striped shirt. Ironed perfectly. I picked it up and unfolded it.
The button on the left cuff was still there. But the thread was white.
The green thread was gone. Either someone snipped it, or maybe it tore and the button fell off, and someone—Nelli, of course, it had to be Nelli—found it and sewed it back on. With white thread, neatly, in a criss-cross stitch, just like our grandma taught us.
I stood there holding the shirt, pressing the cuff to my face.
So that’s it. That’s what was scratching at me.
It wasn’t the shirt. It wasn’t Gena. It was that for three months, my sister had been washing and ironing my husband’s shirts, sewing on his buttons, feeding him lunches because she knew he couldn’t work on an empty stomach, his ulcer and all. She drove my mom to the neurologist. Wrote mom little notes with her number, twice, big and clear, but never mine. And all that time, I lived nearby, in the same city, just forty minutes away by bus, and I noticed nothing. Because I didn’t want to see.
Between the two of us, the outsider in this story wasn’t her.
I hung the shirt on a hanger. Then took it down again. Then I sat on the edge of the bathtub and just stayed there for a long time, until the dull gray morning light started to creep in under the door.
On Sunday, I headed to Nelli’s place at seven in the morning. Alone. I brought a cabbage pie again—because it was the only thing I could bake and know it would turn out right.
She opened the door in her pajamas with cats on them, sleepy, her hair all messy.
“Vera? Is something wrong with Mom?”
“No. I came to work.”
“What do you mean?”
“Show me what needs to be done. In the room.”
Nelli looked at me, one hand on the doorframe. Then she stepped back.
The room was almost finished. Pale flower wallpaper, Mom’s favorite pattern, just like we had in our nursery back on Sadovaya. By the window, a bed with a tall headboard. Above it, empty hooks waiting for photos.
“Gena said I should hang the curtains myself,” Nelli said from the doorway, arms wrapped around herself. “But I keep putting it off. I just can’t choose.”
“Let me do it.”
“Vera, you don’t have to.”
“Nell.”
She fell silent. I set the pie on the windowsill and opened the bag I had brought from home. Inside were Mom’s old curtains, the ones from Sadovaya, from our nursery—yellow, with tiny blue polka dots. I’d kept them in the storage closet for twenty years, without knowing why. Mom wanted to toss them, but I took them.
Nelli came over and touched the fabric.
“Are these…?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought they were thrown out.”
“I didn’t let that happen.”
She sat down on Mom’s new bed and started to cry. Not like that time with Oleg, sobbing endlessly, but quietly, grown-up, her hand resting on the fabric.
I climbed up on a stool. Nelli held my knees steady, just like I used to do for her when she reached for jam on the top shelf. The curtains were a bit too long. I thought I’d hem them. With white thread. I was out of green anyway.
Gena arrived at eleven. He saw the yellow curtains, saw me with a hammer in my hand, and stopped in the doorway.
“What are you two up to?”
“Hooks for photos,” Nelli said. “Vera says they’re crooked.”
— It’s crooked, — I confirmed. — The left is two centimeters lower.
— No way, — Gena said, stepping up and squinting. — It really is lower. Just look at that.
He took the hammer from me, his rough fingers brushing against mine and lingering a moment longer than necessary.
At lunchtime, the three of us sat in Nelka’s kitchen eating pie, drinking from mugs with giraffes on them, with nothing particularly special being said. Gena told a story about a client who wanted bathroom tiles in the ‘color of morning mist,’ but ended up buying a shade so gray it made the bathroom look like a morgue. Nelly burst out laughing. I glanced at her scar and thought that I should buy my mom slippers just like Nelly’s, with rubber soles.
At four o’clock, we headed out to pick up Mom.
She was waiting for us in the hall, dressed, with her coat and beret on, clutching her purse on her lap. Thank goodness she’d taken off her robe. Mom sat on a little stool by the door, staring at the keys in her hands as if trying to remember what they were for.
— Here are my girls, — she said. — You’re late from school. I was getting worried.
Nelly looked at me. I looked at Gena. He took Mom’s bag.
— Let’s go home, Zinaida Pavlovna, — he said. — Your curtains are waiting for you.
— What curtains?
— The yellow ones, Mom, — I told her. — The polka-dotted ones.
Mom considered it, lips pressed together. Then, suddenly, she smiled, bright and youthful, and my lips started to tremble again.
— Oh, I remember them, — she said. — You two used to sleep under those curtains on the floor when the nursery was cold. Vera, you always put Nelka by the wall. To keep her from falling off.
In the evening, after we got home, Gena immediately went to take a shower. I could hear the water running, him humming something off-key to himself, just like he used to when Dania was little and wouldn’t go to sleep.
I took the blue shirt from the closet. I washed it by hand in a basin with the same soap that used to make Mom’s bathroom smell like childhood. I wrung it out, then hung it over the drying rack above the tub.
Then I took my grandmother’s jewelry box. At the very bottom, under buttons from my and Nelka’s coats, I found a small coil of green thread—barely enough for two stitches.
I didn’t bother sewing anything. I just put the spool of thread in the shirt pocket. Let it stay there.
Gena came out of the bathroom in a towel, spotted the shirt, and stopped in his tracks.
— Did you wash it?
— I did.
— But it was clean. Nelly ironed it.
— I know.
He stood there for a moment, then nodded, as if he understood something I hadn’t figured out yet. Then he went off to put the kettle on.
I turned off the light in the bathroom. It flickered twice before going out.
