Nastya walked slowly from the bus stop, swinging her empty bag. An hour earlier, she had dropped Pavlik off at her mother’s place, and now she had a free evening and an entire weekend ahead of her. She was almost confused by such luxury—what was she supposed to do with herself? One thing was certain: cleaning was canceled, come hell or high water.
“I should stop by the store,” she thought as she turned into the courtyard. “Get something delicious, disgracefully unhealthy, and loaded with calories.”
Nastya worked as a puppet maker at a marionette theater, and after spending an entire week struggling with a temperamental jointed ballerina, she wanted some simple human pleasures.
Like cake.
But her happiness ended the moment she turned toward the entrance to her apartment building.
Standing by the door like two monuments from another era were her mother-in-law, Tamara Grigoryevna, and her father-in-law, Gennady Petrovich.
Surrounding them were three bulging duffel bags, a gigantic checkered sack the size of a hippopotamus, and a suitcase that would have made a polar explorer jealous.
Nastya froze behind an old maple tree.
They hadn’t noticed her. Her mother-in-law was energetically explaining something to her husband, repeatedly pointing toward the third-floor windows.
Their windows, incidentally.
Nastya pulled out her phone and called her husband.
Ring.
Once.
Twice.
Five times.
Nikolai, a pyrotechnic show director, was forever disappearing onto work sites and answered his phone only about half the time—there were explosions, charges, equipment, safety procedures.
“Of course,” Nastya hissed under her breath. “The moment an airborne division lands outside our building with suitcases, you’re naturally unavailable.”
She typed a message, angrily stabbing the screen with her finger:
“Kolya. Your parents are outside the building. They have bags and a suitcase. This is NOT a social visit. I DO NOT AGREE.”
She sent it and headed toward the café on the corner.
She had absolutely no intention of participating in the war that was about to break out.
Let their son deal with the people who had produced him.
At the café, she ordered coffee and sat against the wall, boiling inside like a kettle forgotten on the stove.
Her memory obligingly dragged up a story from five years earlier.
Nikolai’s grandfather, may he rest in peace, had left his house equally to his two grandsons—Nikolai and his brother Viktor.
Viktor was already married to Olya at the time and had clung to that inheritance like a tick to a dog. He practically fought tooth and nail for his share, calling, pressuring, and hinting that “a bachelor doesn’t need much anyway.”
Nikolai had nearly gone gray with anger, but things never turned into an outright war. The house was sold, and the money was divided fairly.
Nikolai later used his half as the down payment on a three-bedroom apartment—the very apartment where he and Nastya now lived.
Nastya’s parents contributed their savings too, and six months earlier they had ceremoniously buried the mortgage for good.
Nikolai’s parents, meanwhile, had stood off to the side through all of this and remained silent like fish in an aquarium.
“So what exactly are you doing on my doorstep now with suitcases?” Nastya muttered into her coffee foam. “You’ve brought enough belongings to winter in Antarctica.”
Nikolai approached the building exhausted. He had spent the entire day assembling a pyrotechnic program for a city festival, and his hands smelled of gunpowder and irritation.
He pulled out his phone just before reaching the archway, read his wife’s message, and stopped dead.
“I DO NOT AGREE.”
In capital letters.
Nastya had written to him in capital letters only twice in their entire life together, and both times things had ended seriously.
Nikolai immediately understood the situation.
Either he defended his home right now, or the war would move straight from the front door into their bedroom.
“Kolya!” his mother exclaimed when she saw him, blooming like a flower bed in May. “Sweetheart! We’ve been waiting and waiting for you!”
Gennady Petrovich silently grabbed the suitcase in a businesslike manner, as confidently as an experienced porter.
Nikolai stepped in front of him and gently but firmly took the suitcase from his father’s hand.
He placed it back on the pavement.
“Stop,” he said. “To what do I owe this visit? With enough luggage for a month-long polar expedition?”
“What, parents aren’t allowed to visit their son?” Tamara Grigoryevna went straight to the point. “Viktor and Olya had twins! Anechka and Mashenka! They were renting an apartment, throwing money down the drain—it was terrible. So we transferred our apartment to him. Signed it over as a gift.”
“Congratulations to Viktor,” Nikolai said slowly. “On the twins and the apartment. But what does that have to do with you standing here with bags?”
“You can’t fit six people into a two-bedroom apartment!” his mother threw up her hands. “Viktor, Olya, the two babies, and the two of us! That isn’t living, it’s sardines in a tin! So we decided we’d stay with you. You have three bedrooms. Plenty of space!”
Nikolai remained silent for about five seconds.
Inside his head, something was clicking like a taxi meter.
He remembered how Viktor had fought over their grandfather’s inheritance.
He remembered that in five years, their parents had visited their grandson Pavlik exactly once—six months ago, for an hour and a half, bringing a single Kinder Surprise.
“Wait a minute,” Nikolai said with poisonous politeness. “Why did you transfer the apartment at all? Viktor had money from Grandpa’s share. Exactly the same amount I did. I put mine into a mortgage. Couldn’t he have done the same? He and Olya could easily have afforded a two-bedroom apartment.”
“Well, aren’t you good at counting other people’s money!” Gennady Petrovich barked. “There was money, now it’s gone. What business is it of yours? Enough talking. Open the building door. We’ll discuss this upstairs, not out here in the street.”
Nikolai pulled out his keys.
His father stepped forward in visible relief.
And then Nikolai deliberately lowered the keys back into his pocket and zipped it shut.
“No,” he said. “We’re having this conversation here and now. You’re not entering the apartment with those suitcases. The apartment belongs to Nastya and me jointly. We bought it during our marriage, and her parents helped us finish paying for it. Without her consent, I wouldn’t even bring a ficus plant into that apartment. And she does not consent. She already wrote to me.”
“She wrote to you?!” his mother gasped. “Your wife tells her husband what to do?!”
“My wife informs her husband,” Nikolai corrected her. “And I agree with her two hundred percent.”
He paused.
“Besides, I have a son, Pavlik. Your grandson, in case you’ve forgotten. You visited him six months ago. For an hour and a half. So don’t lecture me about family bonds. Your family bonds snapped a long time ago. I’m simply documenting the fact.”
“Kolya, how can you even say something like that?” Tamara Grigoryevna switched into her wounded voice, trembling professionally with almost musical vibrato. “We’re old! We have nowhere to go! We devoted our entire lives to you boys!”
“Are you a son or what?!” his father thundered. “You have three rooms! One room would be enough for us! We wouldn’t take up much space! What, you begrudge your parents one little corner?”
“A corner?”
Nikolai smiled bitterly, using only his lips.
“That corner belongs to me and my wife. Not to you. And I don’t see a single reason why I should let you move in. Not one, Dad. Come visit? Of course. I’ll make tea, cut you a piece of pie, you can spend time with Pavlik. But live here? No. Never.”
“He doesn’t see a reason!” his father shouted, his face turning crimson. “The reason is that we are your parents!”
“My parents,” Nikolai nodded. “The parents who took their apartment and gave it to one son. Not both sons. One. Without saying anything, without calling, without asking. And now you’re standing outside the second son’s door demanding living space. Brilliant idea. Standing ovation.”
He walked toward the entrance, touched his key to the intercom, then turned around.
His mother stood there bewildered.
His father looked as angry as a wasp in September.
Nikolai spoke calmly and distinctly, loudly enough for the entire courtyard to hear.
“You signed the apartment over to your son? Then let that son take care of you now. He got the apartment, so he got the responsibilities too. Fair is fair. Goodbye.”
The building door closed behind him with a soft, merciless click.
Tamara Grigoryevna stood staring at the closed door, unable to believe her eyes.
Her son.
Her own son.
Had refused to let her in.
He had turned around and walked away as if she were some traveling lottery-ticket seller.
“Happy now?!” Gennady Petrovich spun toward his wife, his voice gaining speed like an old motorcycle. “It was your idea! ‘Let’s give it to dear Vitenka! Let’s give it to dear Vitenka! He has twins! He needs it!’ Well, we gave it to him! Now the two of us are homeless people with a suitcase. Congratulations!”
“Gena, stop yelling across the whole courtyard!”
“I will yell! I told you not to give everything away! I told you to keep at least a share for ourselves! But no! You’re smarter than everybody! Poor little Vitenka, the helpless darling with two cars!”
“One car…”
“One car! Bought with Grandpa’s money! The same money Nikolai put into an apartment, while your darling put his into metal and a beach vacation with Olya!”
His father-in-law angrily kicked one of the duffel bags.
“So where do we go now, my brilliant strategist? Where?!”
“Well…” his mother-in-law swallowed. “We can’t go to Vitya’s. It’s too crowded there now…”
“The dacha!” Gennady Petrovich snapped, pulling out his phone to call a cargo taxi. “We’re going to the country house. You can dig around in the garden. Good for the nerves.”
“I hate the dacha!” Tamara Grigoryevna wailed. “There are mosquitoes! Flies! The toilet is outside! It looks pretty in pictures, but in real life it’s a shed surrounded by seedlings!”
“You should have thought about what you liked before signing away the apartment,” her husband said through clenched teeth.
Nastya had been standing at the far end of the courtyard behind the playground the entire time, watching.
She saw the cargo taxi arrive.
She watched her father-in-law angrily throw the bags into the back—one, two, three.
The suitcase flew in after them with the thunderous indignation of an offended polar explorer.
Her mother-in-law climbed into the cab wearing the expression of someone whose pension had just been canceled.
Only after the vehicle disappeared through the archway did Nastya head toward the entrance.
As she walked, she wondered what exactly Nikolai had told them.
Judging by the speed of the evacuation, it must have been something concise.
She opened the apartment door.
Nikolai didn’t say a word about his conversation with his parents.
He had already reheated dinner, put plates on the table, and behaved as if it were the most ordinary evening in the world.
“Change clothes and sit down,” he said. “The cutlets are hot. We can talk later. Or never. We’ll see.”
“You’re my hero,” Nastya said with a smirk. “Judging by the way those bags were flying around, the negotiations went extremely well.”
“Extremely,” Nikolai agreed. “There were fireworks, but no casualties. Professional habit.”
Nikolai’s phone rang as they were finishing their cutlets.
The screen displayed:
“Viktor.”
Nikolai looked at his wife, sighed, and answered.
“Are you completely insane?!” his brother screamed so loudly that Nastya could hear him from across the kitchen. “You threw Mom and Dad out! Our own parents! Into the street! They called me from the dacha—Mom’s crying, Dad’s climbing the walls!”
“Hello to you too, Vitya,” Nikolai said with poisonous good humor. “Now here’s my question: why did you throw our parents out of their own apartment?”
“Me?! I didn’t throw anybody out! They gave it to me themselves!”
“Exactly,” Nikolai nodded at the phone. “They gave it away themselves. And then somehow ended up standing outside with luggage because there wasn’t room for them in the apartment they gave you. Fascinating coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”
He continued:
“By the way, Vitya, what happened to the money from Grandpa’s share? Need me to remind you? Half went on a car, half went on a vacation with Olya somewhere warm. I put my half into an apartment. Notice any difference in our approaches?”
“Don’t you dare count my money!”
“And don’t you dare count my rooms,” Nikolai snapped. “You took our parents’ apartment, so now you take care of our parents. Support them. House them. Love them. Gifted housing comes bundled with the people who gifted it, little brother. It’s part of the package. Good luck.”
The line went dead.
Viktor had hung up first.
Nikolai put down his phone and shrugged.
Immediately afterward, Nastya’s phone rang.
“Olya” appeared on the screen.
“Oh. Second front,” Nastya said and answered. “I’m listening, Olya.”
“How could you?!” her sister-in-law exploded, words spraying everywhere. “You have a three-bedroom apartment! One child! And we have two girls and a two-bedroom apartment! Would it really have been so difficult to take the parents in?! You have no conscience!”
“Olya,” Nastya said evenly. “Let’s stick to facts. Our apartment was bought using Nikolai’s share of his grandfather’s inheritance and money from my parents. My parents gave us their savings, and we paid off the mortgage.”
She paused.
“Now my question to you: what exactly did your parents contribute? Or Nikolai’s parents?”
Another pause.
“Oh, right. Nikolai’s parents did contribute. They helped Viktor. With an entire apartment. So all questions concerning that help should be directed to the recipient.”
“That’s… that’s not what this is about!”
“That is exactly what this is about,” Nastya replied. “You received the apartment, which means you received the parents too. The logic is ironclad and not subject to appeal. Good night, Olya. Give my best to the girls.”
The call ended.
Nastya put her phone on the table.
Nikolai took it from her hand and switched it off, then switched off his own.
“That’s it,” he said. “Let’s stop breaking our heads over other people’s problems. Yes, my parents screwed themselves spectacularly. What they were thinking when they signed the deed of gift is a mystery wrapped in darkness.”
He leaned back.
“But they are not living with us. That subject is closed. Help them? Yes. Medicine, groceries, fix the fence at the dacha. Support them completely and house them? No.”
“Agreed,” Nastya said, putting her phone into a drawer. “Although I have a feeling tomorrow will bring Act Two.”
“Let it,” Nikolai shrugged. “I’ve got plenty of explosives.”
At that very moment, in the two-bedroom apartment on the other side of the city, another scandal was shaking the walls.
Viktor was yelling at Olya, waving his arms above the babies’ crib where, fortunately, Anna and Maria remained sound asleep.
“You were the one pushing me to buy the car!” he thundered in a furious whisper so he wouldn’t wake the girls, which somehow made his anger feel even thicker. “‘Vitya, everybody else has a car and we look like paupers!’ And then, ‘I want to go to the seaside, I want to go to the seaside!’ Well, there’s your seaside! There’s your car! And the money is gone!”
“And who was the first person who told your mother, ‘Nikolai has three rooms, go live with him’?!” Olya hissed back. “You did! You!”
“I said that after you spent an entire week whining that my mother was constantly underfoot! You drove her out—you figure out where to put her!”
“Me?! I drove her out?!”
Olya could barely breathe from rage directed at everyone at once: her spineless husband, Nikolai with his stone face, Nastya with her accountant-style questions.
“She has it easy now! One child, a three-bedroom apartment, mortgage paid off! And we have twins, a two-bedroom apartment, and your parents hanging around our necks from the dacha!”
“Our problems, Olya. Ours. You wanted the apartment—you got it. Complete with a matching furniture set called Mom and Dad.”
Meanwhile, at the dacha, Tamara Grigoryevna entered the little house and shuddered.
Damp.
Cold.
Uncomfortable.
This was not what she had imagined when she had signed that beautiful official document.
She put her bag on a stool and first scolded herself.
Briefly, purely as a formality.
Then she scolded Nikolai.
For much longer, and with feeling.
And then inspiration struck.
It struck with the sweet bitterness that always comes to the rescue when a person herself is actually to blame.
Nastya.
Of course.
That snake.
She had turned her son against them.
“She talked him into it!” Tamara Grigoryevna declared to her husband, who was struggling with the stove. “Kolya would never do something like this! Kolya is kind! It’s all that little wife of his! That theatrical schemer! She controls puppets for a living, so now she controls her husband too!”
“Uh-huh,” Gennady Petrovich grunted without turning around.
He was thinking about something entirely different.
Thinking bitterly and honestly, the way people only think when sitting beside a cold stove.
You’re an idiot, Gena.
An old idiot.
You went along with your wife.
Then Vitya showed up holding his daughters in his arms, looking so touching, and you melted.
You signed.
You gave away every last square meter.
And Nikolai…
Well, look at him.
Turned around.
Closed the door.
That was it.
No tears, no drama.
He’s probably sitting in his warm three-bedroom apartment with his wife right now celebrating his victory.
Gennady Petrovich struck a match and glared hatefully at the damp firewood.
“We’ll get chickens,” he told his wife darkly. “Since apparently we’re country landowners now.”
“What chickens?!” Tamara Grigoryevna shrieked. “I want to live in the city!”
“Wanting isn’t harmful. We only have one city apartment left now, and your favorite son lives in it. Go ask him to take you in. At least you’ll find out what parental wisdom is worth these days.”
Back in their warm three-bedroom apartment, Nastya really did take out a bottle of wine.
But not because she wanted to celebrate a victory.
There was nothing to celebrate.
The victory had turned bitter, with the aftertaste of someone else’s stupidity.
She had simply remembered the date.
“Kolya,” she said, setting down two glasses. “Do you realize that exactly seven years ago today, you and I met? To the day.”
“No way.”
Nikolai brightened, and the day’s anger began peeling away from him like an old poster from a lamppost.
“Seven years? Was that when I walked up to you at the bus stop?”
“That was when you walked up to me,” Nastya said, pouring the wine, “and with the most serious expression in the world asked me how to get to the library. I decided you were either completely insane or extremely well-read.”
“I confess,” Nikolai said, raising his glass and laughing. “I wanted to meet you, but my mind went completely blank—like my warehouse after a fireworks show. So I blurted out the first thing I remembered from a movie.”
“Right. How to get to the library. At eleven o’clock at night.”
Nastya snorted into her glass.
“And I actually explained the directions to you. In detail. Every turn.”
“And I remembered all of it and went there the next day. I thought maybe you’d show up to check.”
“And I did show up to check!”
Nastya burst out laughing.
“I stood between the bookshelves thinking, ‘If that lunatic actually comes, then it must be fate.’”
They laughed.
The wine was sour.
The cutlets had gone cold.
Somewhere at the dacha, his mother was furious.
Somewhere in the two-bedroom apartment, Viktor and Olya were fighting.
And all those relatives hung over their family like a storm cloud over a field.
But here, at this table, everything was quiet.
Everything felt right.
“To the library,” Nikolai said.
“To the library,” Nastya agreed.
“The one that’s been open twenty-four hours a day for seven years.”
