There was a bag standing by the radiator in the hallway—huge, the kind people took with them to wholesale markets. Vera took off her work smock, hung it on a hook, and only then noticed that the bag was zipped shut and visibly stuffed full.
Lidia Arkadyevna came out of the room, stopped in the doorway, and folded her arms across her chest.
“See that bag in the corner? Pack up and go to the station,” her mother-in-law demanded.
“To the station? Where am I supposed to go?”
“Back where you came from. To your Kuznetsovo. Your mother’s house is still there. You’ve got a roof over your head, a vegetable garden. Go live there and be happy.”
Vera leaned her shoulder against the doorframe. Her fingers still smelled of paint, and golden dust from yesterday’s batch of ornaments remained under her nails.
“Lidia Arkadyevna, I don’t understand. We were talking perfectly normally this morning.”
“This morning I hadn’t decided yet. This afternoon I did. Your factory shut down, didn’t it? It did. They haven’t paid you for four months, have they? They haven’t. So what are you in this house now? Another mouth to feed.”
“I’ve been taking side jobs for four months. I paint souvenirs at home and take private orders. I put just as much money into the household as I did before.”
“You contribute pennies and act like a queen,” her mother-in-law said, walking into the middle of the hallway. “This is a three-room apartment, by the way. Mine. It’s registered in my name. I let you live here out of kindness, and now you walk around as if you own the place, hanging your shelves and keeping jars of paint in the storage closet.”
“Igor and I are married.”
“So what? He got married. Big deal. Getting married doesn’t mean you earn an apartment.”
Vera crouched down and pulled the zipper open. The bag was packed tightly, everything crammed inside as though someone had shoved it in with their foot.
On top lay a flannel robe with tiny flowers—not hers. Under it was a stretched-out brick-colored sweater, also not hers. Then came scraps of knitting, an old towel, an ironing-board cover, and a plastic bag containing someone’s worn-out slippers.
“Lidia Arkadyevna, none of this is mine.”
“It is now. You can wear all of it.”
“These are your robes. That sweater is yours too—you took it to the dacha the year before last. Where are my things?”
“Your things, darling, were bought in this apartment with my son’s money,” her mother-in-law said evenly, as though making an announcement over a loudspeaker. “Igor bought your winter coat. Igor bought your boots. You bought the sewing machine together. Everything stays here.”
“I bought the coat with my bonus for the New Year collection. I have the bank transfer.”
“Oh, listen to her. She has proof. What are you, a lawyer now?”
Vera slowly stood up. Her legs had gone numb, and she shifted from one foot to the other.
“What about my brushes? The kolinsky set in the wooden case. Roza Markovna gave them to me when she retired. You can’t replace those.”
“Those little sticks with hair on them? Somewhere in the storage closet. I’ll find them and mail them to you.”
“I’ll take them myself.”
“You’re not taking anything yourself,” Lidia Arkadyevna snapped. “You’re taking that bag and leaving now. Put your keys on the shelf.”
The lock in the front door clicked.
Igor came in, put down his work bag, and pulled off his cap. For three years he had been sitting in the cabin of a tower crane at the construction site beyond the railway tracks, and he usually came home with his eyes red from the wind.
“What’s going on here?” he asked.
“Your mother is throwing me out,” Vera said. “Right now. With a bag full of somebody else’s rags.”
Igor looked at the bag, then at his mother, then back at the bag.
“Mom, come on. What are you doing?”
“What am I doing? I’m doing the right thing. Think about it yourself, son. She’s out of work, you’re supporting everything alone, and I’m adding money from my pension. It’ll be easier for the two of us. She can come back in six months if she learns some sense.”
“Igor,” Vera said, turning toward her husband. “Do you hear what she’s saying? I’m being thrown out of my own home.”
He rubbed his stubble and looked away toward the coat rack.
“Vera, well… maybe she’s right. You can stay at your mother’s place for a while. Fresh air, peace and quiet. Take a break from the city. I’ll save up some money, and then we’ll see.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s better for us this way,” he said. “For the two of us. Things are hard now, but they’ll get better later.”
“For the two of us? Who exactly do you mean? You and me, or you and your mother?”
“Don’t start.”
“I haven’t even started yet.”
Lidia Arkadyevna sighed with the satisfaction of someone whose plan had worked exactly as intended.
“Good. That settles it. Vera, the train leaves at seven forty. I checked. It’s twenty minutes to the station by minibus.”
“You even checked the timetable.”
“I always check everything. I worked as a dormitory superintendent for twenty-two years. Everything under me ran with iron discipline. If you don’t pay, you don’t stay.”
Vera took her jacket. She took the bag too—not because she needed the other woman’s old robes, but because leaving it behind would have felt like agreeing with them.
“The keys,” her mother-in-law reminded her.
Vera placed the key ring on the shoe shelf. The metal struck the varnished wood with a quiet clink.
“Igor,” she said from the doorway. “I put the money from the room I inherited from my grandmother into renovating this apartment. Four hundred thousand. The kitchen cabinets, the windows, the doors, the bathroom.”
“So what now?”
“I’m glad you remember. And your mother remembers too.”
Katya opened the door wearing a robe over sweatpants and immediately stepped aside to let Vera in.
“Come in. I don’t have any slippers. Ninka carried them all out into the hallway.”
The room was tiny—eighteen square meters, a former guard room in a glassworks plant that had shut down. Katya had been living there with her daughter for two years, ever since the factory stopped operating.
“I’ll stay for a week,” Vera said. “Then I’ll figure something out.”
“Stay as long as you need. Just warning you, the hot water works every other day, and Ninka gets up at six.”
“I’ll survive.”
Katya looked at the plaid bag and raised an eyebrow.
“What’s that?”
“A gift from my mother-in-law. Reverse dowry.”
Vera unzipped the bag and dumped everything onto the floor. Robes, sweater, ironing-board cover, slippers, scraps of fabric. At the very bottom, someone had placed a school notebook with an oilcloth cover.
“What’s this?” Katya asked, picking it up.
“I don’t know. It isn’t mine.”
They opened it together. The pages were divided into columns, filled with neat, forceful handwriting.
“Listen…” Katya ran her finger along the lines. “There are dates here. And amounts.”
“Read it.”
“April. Medicine for Vera, four hundred twenty. May. Tights for Vera, three hundred. June. Vera ate half a chicken, one hundred eighty. Vera, did she actually keep track of the chickens you ate?”
“Looks like she kept track of everything.”
“This goes back six years. November: Vera used the washing machine four times, electricity, two hundred. January: Vera took too long in the shower.”
“Give me that.”
Vera flipped to the end. On the last page, beneath a thick line, was a total—the amount she supposedly owed the household.
“This,” Katya said, “belongs in a frame on the wall.”
“This belongs in a cupboard where nobody touches it.”
“Why?”
“Because someone who kept records of my tights might someday claim I stole something from her. And then I’ll have her handwriting.”
Katya whistled.
“I thought you were going to cry, but you’re collecting evidence.”
“I will cry. Give me a week.”
The week was hard.
Vera barely went outside, slept ten hours a day and still woke exhausted, forced herself to eat, and checked her phone three times a day.
Igor texted on the second day:
“Did you get there okay?”
She didn’t answer.
On the fourth:
“Mom says you’re staying with your friend. Stop embarrassing me in front of the neighbors.”
On the sixth:
“They threw your brushes away. They were old anyway.”
After that message, Vera sat down on the floor and stayed there until evening.
“That’s enough,” Katya said when she came back from her shift at the twenty-four-hour bakery where she had found work washing baking trays. “Enough, Vera. I’ve been watching you for a week.”
“Keep watching.”
“No. I won’t. Ninka needs boots, I owe nine thousand for electricity, and the factory on the other side of that wall is dead. Every evening I walk through it like a cemetery. You and I are sitting in the same hole right now. The only difference is that you’re sitting there crying, and I’m sitting there angry.”
“And what does your anger give you?”
“Nothing yet. But at least I’m thinking.” Katya sat opposite her on a stool. “Tell me something. What can you do that nobody else in this town can?”
“I can paint a glass ornament in eleven minutes. Multilayer detailing, gold, frosting.”
“And I know how to frost glass with a sandblaster and cut glass. Naum Ilyich knows how to blow glass with a torch and fuse it, and he’s been sitting inside four walls for three years, grumbling at the television.”
Vera lifted her head.
“What are you getting at?”
“The workshop on the other side of that wall is empty, and the furnace still works. The director is Pyotr Danilovich—you know him. He’s willing to rent out a corner for next to nothing as long as somebody keeps the furnace running and watches the place.”
“Katya, it takes money to start something like that.”
“I have fourteen thousand. That’s everything.”
“I have twenty-two. And a sewing machine that’s still in that apartment.”
“Forget the sewing machine. What else do you have?”
“My head,” Vera said. “And eight hundred thirty designs the factory rejected over ten years because the artistic committee decided customers wanted red ornaments with white stripes.”
“Show me.”
Vera took a folder from the bag—the only one of her belongings she had managed to grab. Katya spread the drawings across the floor, then sat back on her heels.
“Vera. Is this a glass ornament with a city inside it?”
“That’s the winter collection. A lantern ornament. It lights up from the Christmas lights. Two layers of painting: silhouettes outside, illumination inside.”
“And this?”
“Personalized ones. An ornament with someone’s house on it. You photograph the person’s house and transfer it onto the glass.”
“How much could something like that sell for?”
“Three thousand. Maybe four.”
Katya looked at her for a long time.
“Vera. Why have you been carrying these around in a folder?”
“Because I was told nobody wanted them.”
“Who told you?”
“The artistic committee. My mother-in-law. My husband. One after another.”
“And what did you tell yourself?”
Vera gave the faintest smile.
“I told myself: Keep quiet, Vera. They’re feeding you.”
First they went to a lawyer, Sofia Yefimovna, who had once handled Katya’s divorce.
“All right,” Sofia Yefimovna said, folding her hands on the desk. “The apartment was registered in your mother-in-law’s name before your marriage. You were never officially registered as living there. The money from the inherited room was paid in cash. Whose name is on the receipts for the construction materials?”
“My husband’s.”
“Then I’ll be frank with you. You can sue, but it could mean two years of stress and your chances are very weak. Your personal belongings are different. They have no right to keep them. We’ll write a formal demand, send it by registered mail, and give a copy to the local police officer. Usually the belongings come back after that.”
“What about the notebook?” Katya asked. “The one where she calculated the cost of tights?”
“The notebook is wonderful. Not for court, but for understanding.” Sofia Yefimovna smiled faintly. “Vera, understand the most important thing. Nobody owes you that old life back. You’ll get your coat and your boots. Everything else, you’ll have to build yourself.”
Her belongings were returned twelve days later.
Igor brought them himself, left three bags by the entrance to the building, and called from downstairs.
“Come down. I’m here.”
Vera went downstairs. He was standing beside the bags with his hands in his pockets.
“Mom is furious,” he said. “The police officer came by.”
“I know.”
“Why did you have to do that?”
“Because I need my boots, Igor. Winter is coming.”
“You could’ve just asked.”
“I did. Then I got a message saying my brushes had been thrown away because they were old.”
He shifted from one foot to the other.
“Vera, come on. Let’s be reasonable. Come over and we’ll talk. Mom will calm down.”
“You’re inviting me back? Into that hell?”
“I’m saying come over and talk.”
“Those are different ver—” Vera stopped herself and tried again. “Those are not the same thing, Igor. Inviting me home and inviting me over for a conversation are completely different.”
“What do you want me to do? Fight with my mother? She raised me alone.”
“I want you, just once in your life, to tell her no.”
He was silent for about ten seconds.
Then he said:
“It’s better for us this way.”
“You already said that. In the hallway.”
“And I’ll say it again.”
“Fine,” Vera said. “Then pick up those bags and put them over there by the door. They’re heavy.”
He did.
She said, “Thank you,” and went upstairs.
He did not move until the door closed behind her.
Two days later, the three of them stood in the freezing corner of the former factory workshop.
Naum Ilyich, eighty-one years old, walked around the furnace, tapping the brickwork with his knuckles.
“She’s alive,” he announced. “Patch this up, replace the burner, change the firebrick, and she’ll run. Where are you getting the glass tubing?”
“Nikolsk,” Vera said. “I called. Minimum order is twenty kilograms.”
“Do you have money?”
“Thirty-six thousand.”
“That’s not money.”
“It’s a start,” Katya said.
The old man looked at them over his glasses.
“Girls, do you even understand what you’re getting yourselves into? I worked at this factory for forty-seven years. It didn’t close because we were bad at our jobs. It closed because a Chinese ornament costs eighteen rubles.”
“Ours will cost three thousand,” Vera said.
“Who’s going to buy one for three thousand?”
“Someone who doesn’t need an ornament, but a memory. Naum Ilyich, can you blow an ornament with a flat face? So I can paint on it like a medallion?”
The old man was silent.
Then he took off his glasses, wiped them, and put them back on.
“I can. I could do things a lot harder than that. Nobody ever asked.”
The first year was brutal.
They fired the furnace at night because electricity was cheaper then and took turns sleeping across three chairs pushed together.
Katya washed baking trays at the bakery until six in the morning, then went straight to the workshop.
Vera painted until she could no longer feel the brush between her fingers.
She bought new brushes—cheap synthetic ones—and taught herself to work with them just as well.
Their first batch, forty ornaments, went on sale at the town fair at the end of November.
They sold six.
“Six,” Katya said that evening. “In three days. Six.”
“That means there are six people who want them,” Vera replied. “We just have to find the others.”
“Where?”
“Among people who already know how to sell.”
She visited nine gift shops and four hotels.
Eight shops rejected her.
The ninth agreed to take ten ornaments on consignment.
At the Severnaya Hotel, the manager, Zhanna Tikhonovna, turned one of the ornaments in her hands and suddenly asked:
“Can you make one hundred eighty of these with our building on them?”
“By what date?”
“December twentieth.”
“We can.”
Vera walked out onto the street, made it twenty steps, and sat down on the curb because her legs refused to carry her any farther.
Then she called Katya.
“One hundred eighty.”
“One hundred eighty what?”
“An order. A hotel. Their building on the flat side.”
The line went silent.
“Vera. We have three days for the design and eighteen days for everything else.”
“I know.”
“So we don’t sleep for eighteen days?”
“We sleep four hours each. Naum Ilyich works the burner, you do the sandblasting, I paint. We’ll send Ninka to stay with your aunt.”
They delivered the order on the nineteenth.
Zhanna Tikhonovna paid them and then resigned from the hotel.
A month later, she came to see them.
“I’m fifty-four years old, and I’m sick to death of keeping track of towels. I know how to sell. Will you take me?”
“We can’t afford to pay you.”
“I’ll wait three months. After that, I’ll take a percentage.”
Their first real breakthrough came at the end of that December.
They closed the year with a net profit of four hundred thirty thousand.
They split it four ways, paid the overdue electricity bill, bought Ninka her boots, and purchased a second burner.
During the second year, five more people joined them.
Two women from the closed factory, a welder who built drying racks for them, and Roza Markovna—the same mentor, now seventy-six years old—who walked in and said:
“I heard you’re doing what I taught you.”
“I am.”
“Show me.”
Vera showed her.
The old woman studied the ornament silently, then held it up to the light.
“You didn’t finish the lower right edge properly. Everything else is good. Very good, Vera.”
And that was when Vera cried.
For the first time since that hallway.
Igor called near the end of the second winter.
The number was unfamiliar.
“Vera, it’s me.”
“I’m listening.”
“How are you?”
“Working.”
“Mom says you’re doing well. A neighbor told her. You have some kind of workshop. Those ornaments.”
“A workshop.”
“Listen…” He hesitated. “I need to borrow some money. Two hundred thousand. I’ll pay you back. I’m just going through a rough patch.”
“What kind of rough patch?”
“Well… a bad one. I got myself into something. I’ll pay it back in a month.”
“Igor, the only reason we aren’t divorced is that neither of us has gotten around to filing the papers. I’m not your wife and I’m not your bank.”
“So you won’t give it to me.”
“No.”
“I knew it,” he said. “Mom was right. You only ever think about yourself.”
“Igor.”
“What?”
“When they were throwing me out with a bag full of somebody else’s old robes, I wasn’t thinking about myself. I was thinking you were about to say, ‘Mom, stop.’ You said something else. That was the day I started thinking about myself. And as you can see, it worked out pretty well.”
He hung up.
By the third winter, the workshop occupied the entire former factory floor.
Eleven employees.
Two furnaces.
Four burners.
A contract with a hotel chain.
Shipments to St. Petersburg and Kazan.
Their own small shop in the town center.
And painting classes every Saturday that were booked a month in advance.
Pyotr Danilovich sold them the premises on an installment plan.
At eighty-four, Naum Ilyich was training two young men and complaining that young people didn’t even breathe properly.
Katya and Nina moved into a two-bedroom apartment.
Zhanna Tikhonovna traveled to exhibitions and came back carrying folders full of orders.
One December evening, after spending the entire day at a fair, Vera stopped by a supermarket near her home.
She took a basket and walked toward the meat section.
Near the checkout lanes, beside a toy vending machine, stood a woman wearing a puffer coat that had once been burgundy.
She held her hands together in front of her and quietly said to passing shoppers:
“Please, kind people. Anything you can spare.”
Vera stopped about five meters away.
Lidia Arkadyevna seemed shorter now.
Her face had sagged, and her chin trembled slightly.
She had not seen Vera yet.
Then she did.
She recognized her immediately.
Vera could see it in her eyes.
“Vera,” she said. “Verочка… Vera.”
“Hello, Lidia Arkadyevna.”
“So… you live around here now?”
“I do.”
Her mother-in-law took two steps forward, shuffling across the wet tile in felt boots.
“I’m… well, you see how things are. Don’t think I do this all the time. Only sometimes, when there’s nothing left. We’re in trouble, Vera. Terrible trouble.”
“What happened?”
“Igor. My Igor.” She began speaking quickly, swallowing her words. “He started drinking. Heavily. They fired him. Took him off the crane because they said someone like that couldn’t be trusted with the controls. And then he got into this thing on his phone… some game. That cursed casino on the phone. First a thousand, then ten thousand, then he took out a loan, and then another one.”
“Go on.”
“Then we sold the apartment. Our three-room apartment. We got five million two hundred thousand for it, but only enough was left for a one-bedroom place in Zarechye, forty minutes outside the city. The windows face the heating pipes, and the elevator doesn’t work. I’m on the fifth floor, Vera. With my legs. The fifth floor.”
“And the money?”
“The money, he… he lost it in eleven days. Eleven days, Vera! I told him, ‘Igor, that’s our home, those are our walls!’ And he says, ‘Mom, leave me alone. I’m about to win it back.’”
“Did he?”
“Of course not.” Lidia Arkadyevna sniffed. “Now he lies around at home. My pension is twenty-one thousand. Eight thousand goes to utilities, and he finds the rest and takes it. So here I am. You know, I’m not ashamed anymore. Shame is something you feel when your stomach is full.”
A woman with a shopping cart passed them, glanced over, and kept going.
“Vera,” her mother-in-law said, stepping closer, her voice becoming thin and pleading. “You used to be kind. Forgive me, will you? Back then… I didn’t mean any harm. I was just afraid for my son. That’s my personality. I was a superintendent all my life. I don’t know how to speak any other way.”
“I remember how you spoke.”
“Yes, I was harsh. I was. But life beat me down! I raised him alone, inside four walls, without a man, on a salary of one hundred twenty rubles! Do you even know what that’s like?”
“I do. I know what it’s like to stand at a railway station in November with a bag full of somebody else’s old robes.”
Lidia Arkadyevna fell silent.
Her lips moved, but no sound came out.
“You put that notebook in there too,” Vera said. “The oilcloth one. The one where you calculated the cost of my tights and half a chicken. I still have it.”
“What notebook…?”
“April: medicine for Vera, four hundred twenty. June: Vera ate half a chicken, one hundred eighty. January: Vera spent too long in the shower.”
“I don’t remember,” her mother-in-law whispered.
“But I do. You know, I remember quite a lot. I remember how you checked the train timetable in advance. I remember Igor saying it was better for us. And I remember how I spent a week on the floor in Katya’s room because I couldn’t make myself get up.”
“But you… you made something of yourself!” her mother-in-law suddenly said, coming to life. Something restless flashed in her eyes. “People told me! You have your own workshop, your own shop on Pervomayskaya Street, you have a car! So everything turned out well in the end! That means it wasn’t such a bad thing!”
“That’s where you need to stop, Lidia Arkadyevna.”
“Where?”
“Right where you’re trying to take credit for my life.”
Her mother-in-law pursed her lips.
“I’m not taking credit. I’m just saying…”
“You’re saying that because I survived, throwing me into the water wasn’t so terrible. And that I should thank you for it.”
The woman went completely silent.
Vera turned away and walked along the aisles.
She took a shopping cart, removed a large plaid bag from a hook—exactly like the one that had once stood beside the radiator—and placed it in the bottom.
Then she moved through the store.
Buckwheat.
Rice.
Pasta.
Cooking oil.
Sugar.
Flour.
Tea.
Two cartons of eggs.
A chicken.
Canned meat.
Cheese.
Cottage cheese.
Three cartons of long-life milk.
Oatmeal cookies.
Onions.
Potatoes.
Carrots.
Apples.
Laundry detergent.
Soap.
Toothpaste.
At the checkout, she paid by card and packed everything into the plaid bag herself.
It was heavy.
About twenty-five kilograms.
Lidia Arkadyevna was standing by the exit, staring at her in disbelief.
“Vera…”
“Come outside. There are steps. I’ll carry it down.”
Vera carried the bag outside, set it down on a dry patch beneath the awning, and straightened up.
“Vera, I knew it. I always said you had a kind heart,” her mother-in-law began quickly. “I told Igor so many times: we were fools, both of us. Vera was golden, I told him…”
“Lidia Arkadyevna.”
“Yes?”
“This isn’t charity.”
The woman faltered.
“Then… then what is it?”
“Payment for a lesson,” Vera said. “You gave me a lesson in that hallway. It took me a long time to learn it. It was expensive and painful, but I learned it. Consider us even. With interest, because you always loved calculating interest. You gave me rags. I’m giving you groceries.”
“What lesson…?”
“I’ll explain since you asked.
“Lesson one: nobody is obligated to love you just because you make yourself convenient. I cleaned, washed clothes, kept quiet, and put my money into the household, and in the end I was valued at one plaid bag full of your old robes. So I should never have been trying to earn my place. I should have been building my own.
“Lesson two: if someone says, ‘It’s better for us,’ ask who exactly that ‘us’ includes. Igor said ‘us’ and meant himself and you. I understood that at the railway station, and I have never again allowed anyone to speak for me in the plural.
“Lesson three, the most expensive one: rights are not something you beg for. You put them in writing. Everything I own now is registered in my name and written into contracts. The building, the equipment, the ownership shares—everything. That lawyer told me back then, ‘Nobody will give your old life back. You’ll have to build your own.’ And I did. Eleven employees, two furnaces, a shop, classes. Not one square meter that someone can take away from me after checking a train timetable.”
Lidia Arkadyevna stood there holding the handles of the bag.
“So you’re rubbing it in my face.”
“I’m thanking you,” Vera said evenly. “Didn’t you understand? If you hadn’t thrown me out back then, I would still be sitting in your three-room apartment, washing your floors, listening to complaints about how long I spent in the shower, and carrying around a folder with eight hundred designs nobody wanted. Your cruelty and his spinelessness got me back on my feet. Together, the two of you did a better job than any mentor could have.”
“And Igor?” her mother-in-law asked quietly. “You won’t help him?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you can help someone who’s drowning. A man who sells an apartment with his mother still living in it and loses the money on his phone in eleven days isn’t drowning. He’s living the life he chose. That’s his right.”
“But he’s your husband!”
“He’s your son,” Vera said. “You raised him alone. You told me that a hundred times. So keep raising him. I’m not participating anymore.”
“You’ve become cruel.”
“I’ve become an adult. There’s a difference, even if the two sound similar to you.”
Her mother-in-law bent down, grabbed the handles with both hands, and tried to lift the bag.
It didn’t move.
“It’s heavy,” she complained.
“It is,” Vera agreed. “Take one of the carts by the entrance. People leave them there. You can wheel it to the bus stop and take the bus from there.”
“You won’t give me a ride?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I know how one-way trips end.”
Lidia Arkadyevna stood there a little longer.
Then she fetched a cart, transferred the plaid bag into it, and slowly began pushing it toward the bus stop, shuffling across the wet asphalt.
Vera watched her for only a moment.
Then she took out her phone.
“Katya, it’s me. I’m free now.”
“What happened? You sound strange.”
“I ran into my former mother-in-law. Outside the supermarket. She was begging.”
There was silence on the other end.
“And what did you do?”
“I bought her groceries. A whole big bag.”
“Vera, are you serious?”
“Completely. But I told her it wasn’t charity.”
“Then what was it?”
“Payment for a lesson,” Vera said. “Katya, listen. The client from Kazan is arriving tomorrow. We need to approve the new collection. And Roza Markovna asked us to move her table closer to the furnace because her hands are getting cold.”
“We’ll move it. Are you going home?”
“To the workshop. I have eighty ornaments drying there.”
“Vera. Are you all right?”
Vera opened her car, sat down, and placed her hands on the steering wheel.
“I feel like a woman who has the keys to her own front door,” she said. “It doesn’t get any better than that.”