Mother-in-law. Sister-in-law. Daughter-in-law
“Have you ever tried taking your shoes off, Mom? I scrubbed this porcelain tile on my knees with Mr. Proper just yesterday, and you’re marching straight in with mud on your feet.”
I was standing at the entrance to our new veranda, glazed from floor to ceiling, clutching a damp microfiber cloth in my hand.
Galina Vasilyevna did not even turn her head. Breathing heavily, she dragged two one-liter jars in from the entryway. Under the nylon lid of one of them, a cloudy orange mush sloshed around: homemade squash caviar.
“Oh, Olenka, don’t make me take off my galoshes. My joints twist so badly when the weather changes, I won’t be able to bend down,” she said, setting the jars down with a dull thud right on the varnished wooden windowsill. A sticky orange ring instantly spread across the white paint. “You have so much empty space here. And my Svetka is suffocating in a nineteen-square-meter one-room apartment, her back won’t even straighten anymore. You could at least give the girl a corner here for the summer. You’ve got brick mansions here, rooms with space enough for a horse to roam.”
“The rooms are planned as nurseries,” I cut her off, stepping forward and taking the jars off the windowsill. “And we glazed the veranda so we could drink tea here, not store dacha junk. Seryozha, go pour your mother some tea.”
“From a tea bag. Don’t take out the good service; they won’t appreciate it anyway,” she thought to herself.
Sergey came out of the kitchen, guiltily hiding his eyes from me. He was wearing an old gray T-shirt stained with engine oil; he had just been tinkering with the generator in the garage. My husband gently put an arm around his mother’s shoulders, but she merely jerked her shoulder blade away, dodging his affection.
“Rich people,” Galina Vasilyevna grumbled, sitting down on a chair. “Son, you’ve completely slipped out of my hands. Your wife twists you around however she likes. And your mother, by the way, came to you on business.”
I silently went into the kitchen, listening to their conversation out of the corner of my ear.
Half an hour later, Galina Vasilyevna left in a passing Gazelle van, leaving muddy footprints behind her on the floor. Sergey sat at the table, staring blankly into a cup of cooling tea. Beside him, on the oilcloth, lay his phone with a crack running diagonally across the glass. The screen kept lighting up with a green glow: the family chat was boiling over.
“Well?” I sat down across from my husband and crossed my arms over my chest. “What did she come running about? Singing about her Svetka again?”
Sergey sighed, rubbed the bridge of his nose with a finger stained with fuel oil, and said dully:
“Granddad’s apartment… the three-room one on Sobornaya Street. Mother transferred it to Svetka. Drew up a deed of gift. They picked up the documents from the MFC today.”
Inside me, everything seemed to snap, and then boil with renewed force. Grandpa Pasha’s three-room apartment in the very center of Ryazan had always been considered a shared inheritance. For two years, Sergey had gone to his grandfather every weekend: bringing groceries from Lenta, changing diapers, carrying the old man to the bath when his legs stopped working. During all that time, Svetlana had appeared maybe three times at most: to bring a pack of wet wipes from Magnit Cosmetic and immediately demand money “for gas.”
“What do you mean, she gave it away?” I leaned forward. “We had an agreement! We sell the three-room apartment and split the money in half. Our part goes toward the roof and gas for the house, Svetka’s part toward a one-room studio on the outskirts. Your mother sat at this very table, praising my apple pie and swearing everything would be fair!”
“She said that,” Sergey forced out without raising his eyes.
“And? Did you call her?”
“I wrote in the group.”
“And what did that saintly woman answer? Show me.”
Sergey reluctantly unlocked his phone and slid it toward me. On the screen glowed a long text from Galina Vasilyevna, dripping with venom:
“What share are you even talking about? You and Olga live in a huge house, you don’t know hardship. Olga is clever, got an inheritance from her aunt, look how she arranged everything. Why do you need more money? And our Svetochka is wandering around rented corners, she has chilled her joints, she needs it more. You are a man; you should give way to your sister. Instead, you’ve warmed yourself beside a rich woman in her bricks and lost your conscience completely! You’re ready to leave your own sister without a piece of bread. Are you a man or a freeloader living off everything ready-made?”
Then came a comment from Svetlana herself: “Brother, don’t be a cheapskate! Your wife is a businesswoman, she hustles at the market, she’ll earn more, but I have nowhere to live!”
I looked at those lines, and it felt as though I had just been slapped across the face with a wet, filthy towel. Sergey sat pale, his fists clenched. In his eyes was such a deep, childlike hurt—the hurt of a person betrayed by those closest to him—that for a second I felt frightened. Inside our little family, an invisible but deep crack suddenly began to spread.
That same evening.
“So that means I’m a freeloader. Mother is right.”
Sergey’s voice sounded dull. He was sitting in the kitchen in complete darkness. A dim yellow streetlamp shone through the window, pulling his hunched figure out of the gloom. He was monotonously picking at the edge of the old oilcloth tablecloth with his finger, pulling white base threads out of it.
“Seryozh, are you an idiot or pretending to be one?” I flicked on the switch, and the bright chandelier light made him squint. “Your mother robbed you, handed your sister an apartment on a silver platter, and somehow I’m to blame again?”
“Aren’t you?” he finally raised his eyes to me, and wounded male anger splashed in them. “Mother is right. Everything here is yours. The house is yours, the veranda is yours, even that stupid tile is yours. Tomorrow you’ll point me to the door, and I’ll go live by the heating pipes with one suitcase. I don’t have a single square meter to my name. Everything Granddad had went to Svetka, and I’m just… an adopted stray beside a rich woman.”
“We built this house together, with your own hands!” I stepped toward him, but he abruptly stood up, scraping the chair back with an ugly screech.
“We built it on your land and with your premarital money, Olya. The law is the law. I’m nobody here.”
He went into the bedroom and shut the door firmly behind him. Dinner—navy-style macaroni and fresh salad—was left cooling on the stove. That night, for the first time, we slept back to back, separated by a cold wall of silence.
The chill in the house lasted three days. Sergey left for work early, came home late, washed the fuel oil off his hands in the garage, and silently went to bed. On the fourth day, thunder struck.
On Saturday, someone honked at the gate. I stepped out onto the porch and froze. By the wicket gate stood an old, battered Lada Largus with Svetlana behind the wheel. Beside it, Galina Vasilyevna was already getting out of the passenger seat, wrapped in a gray woolen scarf.
“Hosts, receive the goods!” my mother-in-law shouted loudly, flinging open the rear door of the car.
Svetlana began pulling plastic crates out of the trunk, stuffed with musty soil, rusty hand shovels, old rags, and hole-ridden buckets. They dragged all this treasure straight toward our glazed veranda.
“Stop!” I blocked the doorway. “Where are you dragging that?”
“Oh, Olya, don’t flutter underfoot,” my mother-in-law shoved me aside with her shoulder, carrying into the clean vestibule a box from the bottom of which dry black soil spilled onto the light porcelain tile. “Svetochka is starting renovations in her apartment. She’s going to make it loft-style, tear down the wall between the kitchen and the living room for a studio. Where are we supposed to put her things? Let them sit on your veranda for a couple of months. You’ve got plenty of space here.”
“Have you lost your minds?” I shouted, watching as Sveta dragged a heavy sack of old rusty shovels across the floor, leaving deep gray scratches on the tile. “Take your junk and haul it to the dump!”
“Don’t you open your mouth at Mother!” Sveta straightened up, planting her hands on her hips. Her face was covered in a thick layer of foundation from L’Etoile, and her lips were puffed into a spoiled grimace. “We came to my brother. And anyway, Olya, we have business with you. Mom, tell her.”
Galina Vasilyevna wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her sweater and stared at me with a heavy, unblinking gaze.
“Sveta needs two hundred thousand for the redevelopment and demolition of the wall right now. The builders are asking for an advance. You have the money on your card that you were saving for the roof. Withdraw it and give it to us.”
I actually laughed at such nerve.
“Two hundred thousand? For Sveta’s renovation? Should I adjust your crown with a shovel so it stops pressing on your ears?”
“Olya, watch your words!” Svetka shouted. “We’re asking as family! We’ll pay it back… in three years or so.”
“If you don’t give us the money, Svetlana and I will move in with you today,” Galina Vasilyevna said threateningly. “Onto the second floor. You’ve got two empty rooms there. I have every right. I’m still registered in this house. Permanent registration, remember? Try not letting me in, I’ll bring the district police officer!”
Sergey came out of the garage at the noise. He froze at the veranda entrance, looking at the filthy boxes, his crying mother, his shouting sister, and then at me.
“Seryozha…” my mother-in-law said softly, letting a tear roll down her cheek. “Tell her we need to help Svetochka. Or let us stay here, since you’re so sorry to part with the money…”
Sergey looked at me, then at his mother.
“Olya… maybe we really should… give it to them? We’ll get a bonus later for the roof…” he muttered, finally breaking under their pressure.
At that moment, I understood: if I kept silent now and yielded to this brazen pack, they would not merely take our money. They would destroy our marriage and take the last drop of self-respect from my husband. I had to act right now.
“Registered here, are you? You’ll bring the district officer?” I smirked. “Go ahead, bring him. But before that, remember, Galina Vasilyevna, that permanent registration does not give you the right to move third parties into my personal house without my consent. Your Svetka is nobody to me. Not a speck of dust from her galoshes will cross this threshold.”
I turned to my husband and looked straight into his confused eyes.
“And you, Seryozh, if you withdraw even one kopeck from our account for them, you can pack your suitcase right now. You’ll go build Svetochka’s loft with her. I didn’t find myself in a garbage dump.”
Dead silence hung over the veranda. Even Svetka bit her tongue and stared at me. Sergey silently turned around, walked over to the first dirty box with rusty shovels, jerked it up, and dragged it back toward the gate.
“Hey! What are you doing?” his sister shouted.
“Take your things and leave,” my husband said firmly. “There will be no money, and you will not live here. Mom, forgive me, but this is Olya’s house.”
My mother-in-law spat at my feet, called me a “viper under a log” and a “commercial hide,” and then she and Svetka slammed the doors of the Largus loudly and drove off to the city. I watched them go and immediately went up to the second floor, to my work laptop. It was time to use my personal weapon.
As a senior inspector of the State Housing Inspectorate, I knew the Housing Code by heart. First, I logged into the departmental database. Of course. No applications for approval of redevelopment had been submitted for the address of Granddad’s apartment on Sobornaya Street.
Then I went to Svetlana’s social media page. Our “designer” had already posted cheerfully: “Starting a cool renovation! Tomorrow we’re tearing down that stupid wall between the kitchen and the living room on the first floor. It’ll be spacious, loft-style! Hired great guys from the station, they work cheap!”
A cold sweat broke out over me. Granddad’s building was an old brick five-story apartment block. On the first floor, the wall between the kitchen and the room was load-bearing, three hundred and eighty millimeters thick. The floor slabs of all the upper stories rested on it. If those station “handymen” smashed it with sledgehammers, the whole entrance could fold like a house of cards.
On Monday morning, I was sitting in the office of the head of the State Housing Inspectorate department.
“We need to prevent a regional-scale emergency, Mikhalych,” I said, laying Svetlana’s social media printout in front of him. “First floor, load-bearing wall. Unlicensed hired workers. It’ll collapse.”
Mikhalych looked at the papers, frowned, and immediately signed an order for an urgent unscheduled inspection involving a municipal engineer and the district police officer.
On Wednesday at ten in the morning, we were standing at the door of Granddad’s apartment. From inside came the deafening roar of a hammer drill and the scrape of metal. Nobody opened when we rang.
“Break it open,” the district officer nodded to the locksmith from the homeowners’ association who had come with us.
When the door swung open, a scene appeared before my eyes. The entire apartment was covered in gray cement dust. Two half-drunk men in dirty sweatpants had already managed to gouge a huge opening in the load-bearing wall, exposing rusty rebar. The floor slab above had already developed a crack barely visible to the eye.
Svetlana, who had been sitting on the windowsill with a can of energy drink, jumped up as if scalded.
“Who are you? What right do you have to break into private property? Olya?! Have you completely lost your mind, bringing the police?”
“I am at work, Svetlana Pavlovna,” I answered in an icy tone, showing my State Housing Inspectorate ID. “And the police are here on my account. Stop all work. Take the men with the hammer drills to the station to establish their identities and the legality of their presence on the territory of the Russian Federation.”
The HOA engineer was already filming the subsidence of the slabs on camera.
That same day, Svetlana received the full package of documents: an order to immediately stop all work, a protocol for an administrative offense, and a court obligation to restore the load-bearing wall to its original condition at her own expense. And not simply to brick it up, but according to an official reinforcement project using a metal frame, developed by a specialized design bureau with SRO certification. The Ryazan Design Institute estimated the cost of such work on the first floor at one million seven hundred thousand rubles.
A ban on registration actions was immediately imposed on the apartment. Svetka could no longer sell it or legally rent it out.
The next month turned into pure hell for our former relatives. The municipal court acted quickly. To prevent the apartment from being put up for forced auction for failure to comply with the order, Galina Vasilyevna had to urgently take out a crippling loan secured by her own one-room apartment. All the money went to licensed builders, who spent three weeks reinforcing the sagging ceiling with steel channels.
A year passed.
The autumn evening was quiet and cool. Sergey and I sat on our veranda. The floor gleamed with cleanliness—I had long since washed off the gray streaks, and Sergey had carefully polished the scratches with special mastic. In the corner, a new round-bellied samovar hummed cozily, and the air smelled of mint and blackcurrant leaves. We had finally replaced the roof with gray metal tiles that gleamed beautifully under the drops of fine rain. Sergey had done it all himself, with his own hands.
Suddenly, my phone rang. The number was unfamiliar.
“Yes?” I answered, putting it on speaker.
From the speaker came sobs, broken by quick, uneven breathing. Galina Vasilyevna.
“Olenka…” my mother-in-law wailed, and not a trace of her former arrogance remained. “Olenka, dear, forgive us sinful fools. Svetka has gone completely under. The bailiffs blocked all her accounts, and she was pushed out of Granddad’s apartment because of the debts… She’s living with me now in my one-room apartment; we sleep head to toe on one sofa. We don’t even have enough money for bread, the whole loan is hanging on me… Let Svetochka live with you on the second floor? You’ve got empty rooms… As family, for Christ’s sake…”
I silently looked at my husband.
Sergey slowly set down his cup of tea. His face was no longer confused or guilty. He looked like a calm, confident man, the master of his own home. He took the phone from my hands, brought it to his lips, and said in an even, firm voice:
“We have an angry dog, Mom. And the gates are locked. Don’t call here again.”
He pressed the end-call button and put the phone aside. In the yard, beyond the fence, the neighbor was burning dry garden tops, and the wind drove bitter smoke along the ground. Sergey put his arm around my shoulders.
