“Your broth is watery again, Kira. How many times do I have to tell you to make it thicker? I’m not a cow that you can just give water to!”
Kira placed the food container on the bedside table.
It was a municipal hospital on the outskirts of Balashikha, the cardiology department, Room Six with three beds. The bed by the window was empty. The one nearest the door belonged to Alevtina Igorevna, Kira’s mother-in-law, who had been there for almost two weeks receiving IV treatment after a heart scare.
Her mother-in-law stirred the broth with her spoon, grimaced, and pushed the container to the edge of the table without even tasting it.
“Go on, don’t get in the way. The doctors will be making their rounds soon.”
Kira stepped out into the corridor.
Viktor, her husband and Alevtina Igorevna’s only son, was sitting near the window. His headphones hung around his neck. The moment he caught sight of his mother through the half-open door, he jumped to his feet.
“I’m going out for a smoke,” he said.
He did not return ten minutes later.
Or twenty.
Kira knew this routine by heart. Viktor had perfected it over eight years: if his mother felt unwell, he went out to smoke. If she was in the hospital, he “smoked” twice an hour.
The funny thing was that there was nothing for him to smoke. He had quit three years earlier, right around the time he bought a treadmill on credit. The treadmill now stood in their living room covered in his shirts and had never once been switched on.
In the next bed lay Gennady Palych, on his third day recovering from a heart attack. He was doing a crossword puzzle with a ballpoint pen, pressing so lightly that he seemed determined to save every drop of ink. From time to time, he muttered under his breath.
“Seven letters, begins with K…”
“Crocodile,” the woman in the third bed suggested without looking up.
“Doesn’t fit,” Gennady Palych replied, and fell silent again.
Half an hour later, a nurse came in carrying a list of prescriptions.
Alevtina Igorevna immediately switched to the special voice she used whenever there was an audience.
“Just look at this,” she said to the nurse, nodding toward the door through which Kira had disappeared. “My daughter-in-law. She’s been running around after me for eight years, and still she can’t do anything properly. This is wrong, that is wrong. My own daughter can’t come—she has her own life, her own family, so that’s understandable. But why this one keeps hanging around for nothing, I’ll never understand.”
The nurse wrote something in the medical chart and left without replying.
Kira said nothing either.
She had long ago stopped counting how many times a week her mother-in-law made comments like that in front of witnesses—doctors, hospital roommates, even the women working at the pharmacy kiosk across the road.
Even in a hospital gown, Alevtina Igorevna never forgot to pin on a brooch. It was an enamel dahlia she had bought either at some fair or during one of those television-shopping sales.
She draped a checked flannel robe over her shoulders, something deliberately unlike hospital clothing, as though she were the mistress of her own house rather than a patient attached to an IV.
Eight years earlier, in 2018, she had suffered her first stroke.
There had been an ambulance, the emergency department, and a confused doctor on duty who asked who would handle the paperwork and who could stay overnight.
Galina, Alevtina Igorevna’s daughter, had been vacationing in Sochi at the time.
Kira stayed.
The doctor asked again whether there was anyone close to the patient.
“Yes,” Kira had replied. “Me.”
And she signed the first form.
In a way, everything began with that signature.
Food containers three times a week—and always with Doktorskaya boiled sausage, because Alevtina Igorevna refused to eat any other kind.
Taxi rides to the clinic whenever Kira’s car was unavailable—1,200 rubles for the round trip.
Adult diapers—1,300 rubles per package every two weeks.
The previous year, when her mother-in-law fractured the neck of her femur, Kira temporarily reduced her accounting job from full-time hours to one-third of her usual schedule for an entire month.
That cost her twenty thousand rubles in lost wages.
In return, there were IV drips, bedpans, and turning Alevtina Igorevna over every two hours.
Galina called twice during that entire month.
Once to ask how her mother was doing.
The second time to explain why she could not come—her daughter Alisa had exams.
“Our little Alisa is so grown-up now,” Alevtina Igorevna would say fondly whenever Galina mentioned her daughter on the phone.
Viktor and Kira’s children were never mentioned.
They had none.
Galina visited twice a year: on her mother’s birthday and at New Year.
She always arrived with a cake from Lenta supermarket.
Every time, she peeled the price sticker from the lid but somehow never managed to remove it completely.
Once, while Kira was sorting her mother-in-law’s pills into the compartments of a medication organizer, Alevtina Igorevna said:
“You should spend less time running around doctors for me and start thinking about yourself. No children of your own, barely even a proper place of your own. I don’t understand why you’re wasting your youth on somebody else’s mother.”
Kira put the pill organizer down and snapped the lid shut.
“Children aren’t something you can simply ‘manage to have in time,’ Alevtina Igorevna. And I do have a home. I live in it.”
Her mother-in-law snorted and turned toward the window.
Kira knew perfectly well that caring for someone did not give you inheritance rights.
Inheritance was determined either by a will or by the legal order of heirs.
If they had signed a lifetime-support agreement, that would have been different. There would have been a notary, obligations on both sides, and Kira’s duty to provide care would have existed in writing instead of under an unspoken rule of “well, somehow it just became your responsibility.”
No such agreement had ever existed.
She had simply been delivering food containers for eight years.
That was all.
Two days passed.
Kira went to the pharmacy kiosk across the road to buy medication that had been prescribed that morning. When she returned with the bag, the door to the hospital room was slightly open. The ward attendant had forgotten to latch it after rounds.
Her mother-in-law’s voice came from inside, muffled but perfectly understandable.
“She’s been fussing around me for eight years, doctor, but I don’t trust her,” Alevtina Igorevna was saying. “She doesn’t love me. She’s working something off—I can see it. I’m leaving the apartment to Galya. I promised it to her years ago. And this one can keep trying. The harder she works, the more comfortable my life is.”
The doctor answered something brief and indistinct.
From the sounds inside, he was already putting his stethoscope back into his bag.
Kira did not enter immediately.
She stood beside the doorframe.
Eight years of work.
Payment for an apartment that had been promised to someone else.
Then she walked in.
She placed the medicine on the bedside table.
“Good afternoon, doctor,” she said in an even voice.
And then she left to help a nurse with an IV in the neighboring room.
Not one word to her mother-in-law.
Not one unnecessary glance.
During the remaining four days before Alevtina Igorevna was discharged, Kira behaved exactly as she always had.
She brought food.
She carried test results from one department to another.
She stood in line at the pharmacy kiosk.
But inside, something completely different was happening.
Kira was making a list.
It was simple and practical: medication schedules and dosages, the local physician’s phone number, the days when IV treatments were required, and the contact number of the massage therapist who came once a week to work on Alevtina Igorevna’s arm after her fracture.
Kira typed the list at home in the evenings while Viktor watched football in the kitchen.
Gennady Palych was discharged on the third day after Kira overheard that conversation.
As he was leaving, he stopped beside the bag Kira used for carrying food containers.
“You’re doing everyone’s work around here,” he said. “I heard.”
Then he picked up the bag containing his belongings and left.
Alevtina Igorevna was discharged on Friday.
On Saturday, Kira waited outside the apartment building for Galina.
Galina arrived supposedly to “check on Mom,” an unscheduled visit considering her usual twice-a-year routine.
“What are you doing standing out here? I came to see Mom,” Galina said, pulling a bag of apples from her car.
Kira held out another bag.
It was sturdy, with a printed sheet lying on top.
“Take this. Everything is written down for the next two weeks: what she needs, when she needs it, how much to give her, and who to call if her blood pressure spikes. After that, you’re on your own.”
“What do you mean, on my own?”
Galina did not even take the bag. She pulled her hand away.
“I have a job. I have Alisa. I have my own family, you know!”
“So do I,” Kira replied. “Mine has been on pause for eight years. Now yours can be on pause for a while.”
Galina’s willingness to stay “available” lasted exactly until Kira’s next sentence.
“On Thursday, I heard your mother talking to the doctor. She said the apartment is going to you. Apparently, everything I’ve been doing all these years was simply me earning my keep. So if you’re the heir, Galina, you can take over the shift as well.”
The bag of apples slipped from Galina’s hand.
It hit the pavement, and several apples rolled toward the storm drain.
As luck would have it, Viktor was also in the courtyard at that moment.
He had come outside for a cigarette, despite not having smoked for three years.
The second he heard his sister’s voice, he stared intently at his phone as though something extremely urgent had appeared on the screen, then silently headed back toward the entrance.
“Vitya!” Galina shouted after him.
The building door closed behind him.
“Mom can’t be left without care! She has a heart condition!” Galina tried from another angle.
“Then take care of her,” Kira replied. “Or hire a caregiver. Your mother’s pension is forty-one thousand rubles. I know because I’m the one who always helped her calculate the utility bills. There’s enough for someone to come three times a week.”
Galina finally took the bag with the instructions.
Silently.
Without looking at Kira.
A month passed.
Aunt Valya, Alevtina Igorevna’s neighbor from the fourth floor, ran into Kira outside Pyaterochka and could not resist giving her an update.
Galina had hired a caregiver three times a week for twenty-five thousand rubles a month.
The money came from her mother’s own pension.
Galina herself barely visited. She checked on her mother’s condition through messages instead.
Aunt Valya added that through the wall she could hear Alevtina Igorevna constantly complaining about one thing or another to the caregiver.
The caregiver simply remained silent.
Two weeks later, Galina called Kira herself.
The caregiver was sick, Galina had a deadline at work, and surely Kira could help “just for two days, for old times’ sake.”
Kira listened calmly.
“I go swimming on Tuesdays and Fridays. The rest of the week I’m working full-time—the schedule I’ve finally managed to get back.”
Viktor did not call his mother at all.
At least, not when Kira was around.
Once a week, he asked his sister how their mother was doing, received an answer, and then returned to whatever he was listening to through his headphones.
Kira later saw Gennady Palych again while waiting in line at the clinic.
He was no longer attached to an IV.
But he still had the same crossword puzzle tucked under his arm.
Kira canceled her regular order for broth bones from the butcher shop with a single phone call.