— Oleg Vasylovych told me about it, Mom. Right there by the gate. He mentioned it as casually as talking about the weather: ‘So, are you already packing your things? My Nazar said he had agreed on the price with Vira Ostapivna.’
Yulia stood in the middle of her mother’s kitchen, still in her jacket, without even unzipping it. She was clutching the car keys in her hand, and they rattled softly.
— I wanted to tell you myself. On Sunday, when you come for lunch.
— On Sunday! — Yulia gave a short laugh that sent a chill through Vira. — We’ve lived there for seven years, Mom. Seven! Denys re-roofed that place with his own hands. The kids grew up there. And you just went and sold it?
— I haven’t sold it yet. The deal is in a month.
— Oh, well then, everything’s just perfect.
— Yulia, I told you. From the very start, I said I might sell it.
— You said it the way people say ‘One day I’ll quit this job.’ Every year. And every year, nothing ever happened.
— It’s my house, darling. Nobody’s kicking you out onto the street. You have your apartment.
— A two-room on the ninth floor. With two kids. — Yulia finally put her keys on the table, only to zip up her jacket. — You know what? Do what you want. You always do.
She didn’t slam the door. She closed it quietly, and somehow that was worse. Vira sat over her untouched cup of tea for a long time, staring at the table. There, a printed letter from the university lay: ‘We expect you at the department starting February 1.’
* * *
Vira’s father built this house himself, back when she was still running off to school. For three summers he hauled bricks from the brickyard with a trailer, and people say he tested each one for sound: tapped it with a hammer to see if it rang. Her mother planted apricots and cherries along the path, and Vira’s father strung wire over the walkway to the summer kitchen for grapes. The Isabella grapes grew so thick that by August there was deep shade under them and a sweet, tangy smell in the air.
Her mother passed away nine years ago, and her father even earlier. After that, Vira couldn’t bring herself to go to the dacha for two summers. When she finally went, the gate was stuck, the veranda roof was leaking, and raspberries had crept right up to the windows. She stood quietly in the yard, listened to the birdhouse creak in the wind, locked the doors, and went back.
Vira taught applied mathematics for over thirty years. Lectures, term papers, endless evenings over piles of assignments where students had forgotten the minus sign in the derivative yet again. There just wasn’t time for the dacha. But the bills kept coming: land taxes, the association fees, fixing the fence, replacing roofing sheets on the shed.
She had another idea, too—an old one, dating back to her student days. After her third year, she went on a field trip to the sea and, on the very first evening, sat down on the wet sand in a sundress because she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the water. That’s when she promised herself: someday, I’ll live here. Not just a week’s vacation—I’ll live here. She put off that promise for thirty-five years—for the kids, for work, for her mother. Sometimes, while scrolling through apartment ads in seaside towns, Vira caught herself calculating: if I sell the dacha…
Seven years ago, in May, Yulia called.
— Mom, can we spend the summer at the dacha? Zlata couldn’t sleep all night, it’s thirty degrees in the apartment, Mark is playing ball on the balcony, and the downstairs neighbors have already come up twice. We just need some fresh air.
Back then, Zlata was just learning how to walk, and Mark was about to turn three. Vera brought the keys herself. She showed us where to turn off the water, how to prop open the gate with a brick so it wouldn’t close in the wind, and which room was best to avoid putting the bed up against the wall.
— Just one thing, Yulia. I might decide to sell this dacha someday. Please don’t get too attached, okay?
— Mom, who’s talking about getting attached? — Yulia looked around the room with the wardrobe whose doors never stayed shut. — It’s just one summer. We’ll be careful, I promise.
* * *
That one summer turned out so great, it led to another. At first, they just came for weekends, then Yulia and the kids moved as soon as preschool let out for holidays and stayed until the end of August. On Fridays after work, Denis would bring a watermelon and a bag of charcoal for the grill.
The kids settled in faster than the adults. Mark learned to ride his bike along the path between the apricot trees. Zlata found a hedgehog under the porch and every evening, she’d bring him a little bowl of water, then crouch down and wait. Vera would visit on Saturdays, help pick apricots for jam, and sit with her grandchildren on the old bench her father had built long ago. She was comfortable there. Every time she drove home, she’d repeat to herself, like an important reminder: this is not their home. This is mine.
The third summer, Denis set out to do some repairs. He started small: fixing the steps to the porch, straightening the fence, replacing the gate. Then, over dinner, he carefully brought up the roof.
— Vera Ostapivna, we’ll need to patch the roof over the veranda anyway. I think it would be better to just put metal tiles now, so it lasts thirty years.
Vera put down her fork.
— Denis, thank you, truly. But I’ll be honest, just so nobody gets disappointed later. I can’t promise this house will be yours. I might decide to sell it. Don’t put too much money into it.
— Mom, you say that every year, — Yulia cut in. — We’re doing it for ourselves. For the kids. It’s just making things better for you, too.
Denis didn’t answer, just nodded. By fall, a shiny new roof was gleaming over the veranda.
Over the next five years, the dacha became unrecognizable. Denis insulated the walls, installed new plastic windows, brought running water into the house, and built a shower with a water heater. He transformed the summer kitchen into a guest room, and by the fence, he built a pergola with a grill and a long table big enough for all the neighborhood kids. Yulia planted marigolds and petunias along the path, hung a swing, and put wicker chairs on the porch.
And without anyone really noticing, maybe even herself, Yulia started to take charge.
One August day, Vera arrived and at first couldn’t figure out what had changed. Then she noticed: the grapevine over the path to the summer kitchen was gone. Only a stump remained from her father’s Isabella, and in its place stood a carport.
— Mom, those grapes were so sour even the wasps didn’t eat them, — Yulia dismissed it. — And there was nowhere to park, the car would get boiling hot in the sun.
Vera stayed silent. Only later, while everyone sat in the pergola, did she go over to the stump and stand there for a long time, as if searching for something lost in the grass.
The neighbors got used to it too. ‘Are you going to be here next summer as well?’ they would ask Yulia by the well, and she always answered, ‘Of course,’ without even glancing at her mother. One day, while having tea, her daughter casually said:
«Mom, don’t bother renovating your apartment, don’t waste your money. You’ll end up going to the sea one day anyway. Once you retire.»
Vira was surprised by how confidently Yulia mapped out her life. But she steered the conversation back to the jam. She realized that every silent summer only made her daughter more certain. Just a few more, and her ‘I could sell it’ would sound like a joke.
* * *
In September, Larisa called. They had finished university together and used to share a desk in math analysis class. Now Larisa was heading a department in a seaside city.
«Vira, there’s going to be an opening for an associate professor starting February. I’ve already mentioned your name to the rector. Don’t even think about saying, ‘I’ll think about it.’ You’ve been thinking since you were nineteen.»
«Larisa, I’m fifty-six.»
«And I’m fifty-seven, and every morning I walk to work past the beach. Come over.»
Vira went. The interview lasted forty minutes. She spent another hour standing by the window in an empty lecture hall on the fourth floor, looking out at a gray strip of water and gulls hovering over the pier. On her way home, she felt she had calculated everything. Well, almost everything.
Even a one-bedroom apartment by the sea cost more than she had. Vira decided she would rent out her place in the regional center for a while to have something to live on for the first few months. But the summer house…
Oleh Vasylovych, the neighbor across the fence, seemed to sense it. He stopped her by the gate and nervously fiddled with his cap for a long time.
«Vira Ostapivna, please don’t take this the wrong way. My nephew Nazar and his wife are looking for a house—they just had a baby. He saw what your Denys did here and got really excited. He says he’ll pay well, won’t haggle.»
Vira checked around. After the renovations, the summer house was worth almost twice as much as it had been seven years ago. With what she had saved, it would be enough for a small apartment with a balcony.
In October, on a weekday when there was no one at the summer house, she went there alone. She walked through the rooms, touched the new window sills, opened the shower, which still smelled of Yulia’s shampoo. She went to the shed. Hanging from a nail was her father’s spirit level, with its green bubble that she used to love playing with as a child. In the dresser drawer, she found her mother’s recipe notebook, written in purple ink: «Apricot. For a kilo—700 g sugar. Don’t stir, just shake.»
Vira sat on the bed and cried for the first time in years. After she finished crying, she called Oleh Vasylovych and said she agreed. She also asked him not to tell anyone yet—she wanted to tell her daughter herself.
She didn’t make it in time.
* * *
That same evening, after Yulia left her kitchen, the phone rang late—Vira had already turned off the lights.
«I don’t understand, Mom. I just don’t get it. We thought the summer house would be ours. Sooner or later. You let us remodel it, you saw how much Denys put into it. Didn’t that mean you didn’t mind?»
Vira sat up in bed. She had never made that promise. Not once, not even in passing.
Yulia, I’ll cover the cost of repairs for you. I’ll be fair with the calculations so you won’t lose anything. And if you want to keep the cottage, you could buy it—you’d get everything Dmytro invested credited to you, and I’ll ask less than what Nazar is offering.
Where would we get that kind of money, Mom? Are you serious?
Short beeps.
An hour later, the phone rang again. Yulia wasn’t shouting anymore. Her voice was soft and almost childlike.
«Mark wants to know if he can take the hedgehog with him.»
Vira pressed her palm to her mouth so her daughter wouldn’t hear her.
«You only ever think about yourself,» Yulia said.
«It’s the first time in thirty years I’m thinking about myself, my dear. And I’m not going to change my mind.»
Vitalii called the next morning. Of course, Yulia had already told him everything.
«Mom, how are you doing?»
«I’m fine. Are you going to tell me that I betrayed you too?»
«I’ll say that for seven years, you let them use the cottage for free and never even asked them to pay for electricity.» Vitalii paused. «Yulia will calm down. She always yells first and thinks later. You should go. Ever since I was a kid, you talked about that sea nonstop.»
Denys arrived on Saturday. He sat at the table, placed his heavy hands on the oilcloth, and was silent for a long time.
«I understand everything, Vira Ostapivna. The house is yours on paper, I’m not arguing that. But I hope you can see things from our side too. For us, it stopped being just a cottage a long time ago.»
He spoke evenly, never raising his voice, which made it even harder to listen. He told her how he didn’t go on vacation for three summers in a row because he had to buy insulation. How he decided not to change his car. How he was always on the roof by seven every Saturday while the kids were still sleeping.
«I was sure the house would stay with Yulia and the kids.»
«I appreciate every nail you put in, Denys. But I never promised you anything. Remember that dinner when I asked you not to spend a lot of money?»
«I remember. But five years have passed, and you never brought up selling it again. I thought you’d changed your mind.»
«Just because there wasn’t a buyer doesn’t mean I changed my mind. I didn’t have to remind you every spring that my words still stood.»
Denys nodded. Then he said something that made Vira feel even worse: he and Yulia had never saved up for their own place. There was no need, since this one was always going to be theirs.
He got up, thanked her for the tea—though he hadn’t touched it—and left. Not a single word in protest. Vira watched him go and thought how she didn’t want to lose this family. But she wasn’t going to buy peace at the expense of her own life anymore.
* * *
Two weeks before the deal, Vitalii came to help pack up the things. There weren’t many: her father’s level, her mother’s recipe notebook, an embroidered towel that had hung above the room’s door, a candy box where Mom kept buttons, and a few photos. In one, Dad, sleeves rolled up, stood by a freshly built wall covered in brick dust, laughing.
Vitalii went outside and suddenly called her. Near the stump where their father’s grapevine once grew, a thin shoot was coming up from the ground. It must have sprouted in the summer, but no one had noticed.
«Mom, let’s take it. It’ll grow on the balcony.»
He dug it up with a clump of earth and planted it in an old paint bucket. Vira held that bucket on her lap for the entire ride.
In the evening, she sat down to do the math. Receipts that Denys once showed her, notes in her notebook, prices for metal tiles and windows. She didn’t bother with little things like screws and paint. For thirty years she had taught students that any problem could be solved if you set up the right equation. But this one couldn’t be solved. You could add up the square meters and the hryvnias, but there was no way to tally up the value of the seven years the children had lived under those apricot trees.
She arrived at a sum she considered fair, and after the deal, she transferred almost a third of what she received to Yulia.
There was no response. No call, no message, not even a short ‘got it.’
Vira later found out from her sister that Yulia had told her over the phone, ‘It’s not about the money. She still took our home from us.’ To relatives, her daughter explained that their mother had kicked them out of the house they’d built themselves. Vira never tried to prove anything to anyone. As long as Yulia thought of her mother’s dacha as her inheritance, no explanation was going to change her mind.
* * *
On the first of February, the sea was gray and loud. The wind came off the water so strong that the window panes rattled on the fourth floor. Vira bought a one-room apartment ten minutes’ walk from the university: a small kitchen and a balcony, from which, if you stood on tiptoe, you could glimpse the water between two rooftops.
Her first lecture was for second-year students. Someone was late, another was yawning, someone in the third row was already doodling a boat in the margins. Everything was as usual, and that ‘as usual’ made her hands tremble. After class, Larysa brought her coffee in a paper cup and didn’t ask any questions.
In the morning, Vira drank her coffee on the balcony, wrapped in her coat, listening to the seagulls. Nearby, there was a bucket with a willow branch, wrapped in a blanket to shield it from the wind.
She missed them. Mark, who had probably already outgrown his winter jacket. Zlata, who once called her ‘Puzzle Grandma’ because Vira taught her to count using apricots. A few times she dialed Yulia’s number but hung up before it rang. She didn’t want to have to justify herself again. From Vitaliy, she heard that Yulia and Denys had arranged to rent a house outside the city for the summer. That was some relief: the kids wouldn’t have to stay on the ninth floor all summer.
In April, Vitaliy came to visit for the weekend. He unpacked his bag, hung his jacket on a chair, and pulled a sheet of paper, folded in quarters, out of his pocket.
«This is from Zlata. She asked me to bring it herself. Yulia saw it.»
On the paper, drawn in blue pencil, was the sea, its waves sharp and toothy, and on the shore, a woman wearing glasses with a big book. Above her, in uneven letters: ‘GRANDMA AT WORK.’ And in the corner, so tiny, sat a hedgehog.
Vira held the drawing in her hands for a long time. Then she stuck it to the fridge with a magnet.
That evening she wrote Yulia a single word: ‘Thank you.’ The message stayed unread for a long while. Vira was already washing the dishes when her phone chimed briefly. Under her word appeared: ‘Read.’
There was no reply. Vira dried her hands and stepped out onto the balcony. On the willow she had shielded from the wind all winter, the first leaf had budded—wrinkled and pale green. Not everything takes root right away, she thought. These things need time. And no one tugging at them.
