“Vera, just try to understand me,” twenty-four-year-old Denis said, avoiding my eyes as he nervously turned a glossy, gold-embossed envelope over in his hands. “My mom is flying in from St. Petersburg. Kristina’s relatives are from the countryside. They’re very traditional, almost village people. If both of you are at the restaurant banquet, people will start gossiping, giving strange looks, asking unnecessary questions… Mom will get nervous, and she has high blood pressure. Why don’t you just stay home, and then we can spend some time together separately afterward? We could go to a café or something, okay?”
I sat on my favorite little sofa in the kitchen and looked at the young man who stood a full head taller than me. I looked at his fashionable haircut, the one we had chosen together at a barbershop just two weeks earlier. I looked at the expensive Swiss watch on his wrist—my personal gift to celebrate his recent university graduation.
Pavel, my husband and Denis’s biological father, stood by the window nearby. He was making a determined show of being extremely interested in watching the janitor below chip ice from the sidewalk.
He didn’t turn around.
He didn’t say a word.
“Of course, Denis,” I replied perfectly calmly, without raising my voice. “I understand everything. If you want to celebrate separately, then separately it is.”
The invitation envelope was placed on the table.
Only one name had been written inside:
“Dear Dad!”
At that moment, there was no hysteria inside me. No tears.
Everything simply went quiet, as though someone had permanently switched off the lights. It felt as if someone had pulled the main power lever and shut down the enormous factory of maternal love that had been humming under enormous pressure inside me for years.
I met Pavel when I was twenty-eight.
He was thirty-four and had already been divorced for more than a year.
His ex-wife, Angelika, had left for St. Petersburg in pursuit of a new, exciting romance, leaving her six-year-old son in the care of her former husband.
Back then, Denis was a thin, sickly little boy with a permanently runny nose and the wary eyes of a frightened child.
He accepted me almost immediately.
Probably because I never tried to play the role of the strict stepmother.
I simply became his friend.
I couldn’t have children of my own. Doctors had put an end to that dream when I was still very young.
So all the enormous, unspent, almost suffocating tenderness inside me poured out onto this boy who was technically someone else’s child but gradually became my own.
I treated his endless bouts of bronchitis.
I sat beside his bed through the night whenever he had a fever.
Angelika appeared once every six months. She would send some cheap plastic toy for his birthday and call him on video for five minutes, dramatically wiping away tears for the camera.
“My goodness, how much you’ve grown, sweetheart!”
Then she would disappear again into her beautiful life.
When Denis started school, we went through it together.
I took days off work so I could stay up with him until two in the morning making ridiculous school crafts out of pine cones and chestnuts.
I hired math tutors and paid for them myself out of my salary.
When it came time for Denis to apply to university, he was completely lost.
Pavel waved the issue away.
“Let him join the army. It’ll make a man out of him.”
But I refused to accept that.
Denis and I spent entire days studying university guides and choosing a degree program.
I spoke to my brother, who owned a logistics company, and Denis was given a good position there while he was still in his third year at university.
And two years ago, we bought him an apartment.
More precisely, Pavel and I paid the down payment.
To raise enough money, I sold my country house, which I had inherited from my late aunt.
It had been my own property from before the marriage.
Denis and I went to hardware and renovation stores together, choosing laminate flooring, arguing ourselves hoarse over the color of the kitchen cabinets, and picking out a sofa.
I never thought of him as my stepson. I thought of him as my son.
And now that son was asking me to “stay home” so I wouldn’t embarrass his biological mother—the woman who had remembered she had a son only when it was time for a beautiful celebration.
On the day of the wedding, Pavel put on his best suit.
I carefully ironed his shirt myself and tied his necktie for him.
My husband kept avoiding my eyes. He fussed around nervously and dropped his keys.
“Vera, please don’t be angry,” he muttered while tying his shoes. “He’s young. He’s stupid. Kristina’s relatives really are a little strange about these things. I’ll stay there for a couple of hours, make an appearance, and then come straight home to you. All right?”
“Go, Pasha,” I replied evenly. “You’re already going to be late.”
The door slammed shut. I was left alone in the empty apartment.
I took a large cardboard box out of the closet.
It contained photographs.
Denis on his first day of school.
Denis at the seaside with his sunburned nose.
Denis holding his university diploma.
I went through every single one of them.
Then I carefully carried the box to the storage shelf above the closet and pushed it into the farthest corner, behind the old winter coats.
That evening, I opened social media.
Angelika had posted dozens of photographs from the wedding.
There she was, glowing in an expensive evening dress, standing beside the newlyweds.
There she was again, dancing with her son.
The caption read:
“My boy is all grown up! The happiest day of a mother’s life!”
I closed my laptop and went to make myself some tea.
That evening, I realized something terrible.
I had simply been a convenient, useful object.
Like a washing machine.
Or an ATM.
As long as I solved problems, gave them money, treated illnesses, and carried the household on my shoulders, I was needed.
But when it came time to display their lives beautifully for everyone to see, they were ashamed to put me in the picture.
The rag they had used to wipe away all the dirt had served its purpose.
Now the rag could be thrown away.
Seven years have passed since then.
Pavel and I still live together.
Probably out of habit, the way many couples over fifty do.
He never understood exactly what broke inside me on that wedding day.
And I never bothered explaining it to him.
Denis and Kristina visit us once every two weeks.
They bring their five-year-old son, Pavlik, who was named after his grandfather.
The doorbell rings.
Noise fills the hallway, along with the sound of a child laughing.
“Aunt Vera, hello!” Kristina chirps as she shakes snow from her boots.
Denis hands me the usual supermarket cake.
“Hi. Take your coats off and come in,” I say with my routine smile.
I take the cake and go into the kitchen.
I put cups on the table and slice the cake.
Pavel plays with his grandson on the carpet in the living room.
Denis sits down at the table and sighs.
“Work is a nightmare. We’re desperately short of money. Kristina wants to replace the car, but where are you supposed to find a decent loan these days?”
He looks at me meaningfully.
Out of habit, he expects me to start suggesting solutions, making phone calls, contacting my brother, or digging into my own savings.
I take a sip of tea.
Carefully dab my lips with a napkin.
“Yes, things are difficult for everyone these days. It’s hard for young people,” I say in a completely detached, almost unfamiliar voice.
Then I get up from the table.
“You stay here and talk to your father. I have to go. My online English lesson starts in half an hour. Enjoy yourselves.”
“Aunt Vera…” Kristina blinks in confusion. “We actually wanted to ask you something. Could you watch Pavlik on Saturday? We’ve been invited to our friends’ anniversary celebration.”
I stop in the kitchen doorway.
I look at my daughter-in-law.
Then at Denis.
“I can’t, Kristina. I have my own plans for the weekend. Call Angelika. She’s his grandmother, after all. I’m sure she’d be delighted.”
I turn around and walk into my room.
I close the door.
I sit down at my laptop and open my lesson.
There is no resentment.
No anger.
No secret hope that one day they will realize what they did and come crawling back on their knees.
I simply don’t care anymore.
Do you know what happens when you badly freeze a finger?
At first, the pain is unbearable.
Then your skin feels as though thousands of needles are piercing it.
And afterward comes complete, icy numbness.
You feel nothing at all.
That is exactly what happened to me.
Something inside me was simply cut off.
