She never remembered her dreams. He could recount every one of his dreams in the tiniest detail. She liked to sleep in longer, while he got up at five in the morning even in winter. But both of them loved potato pies and detective series.
“That’s the killer,” the husband would confidently proclaim, pointing with a broken fingernail stained with grease at the TV screen, to which he always sat as close as possible. “Mark my words.”
And he was never wrong.
For the last ten years, that was the only thing that still connected them. Ever since their youngest daughter took their granddaughter away, old age settled in the house.
Inga didn’t notice it for a long time, brushing it off. The gray in her light hair was invisible; the wrinkles settled on her face unnoticed, like fragile butterflies. Then veins started crawling up her legs like roots washed out by a river stream; lumps grew on the side of her foot so no normal shoes fit anymore—she had to buy wide slippers, a couple of sizes too big. But that wasn’t the main thing. Inga no longer loved her husband. Not that she stopped loving him—no. It was just that this feeling had faded along with the already weak pigment in her hair.
“I love you,” she said out of habit every morning when her husband left for the garage, but she didn’t really feel it.
He hadn’t worked in the garage for a long time, just went there out of habit: to play cards, give advice to the young ones, sometimes have a drink. Before, Inga waited for him, peeking out the window, but now she was glad when he went.
And once, she had loved him so much! She had stolen him away from a friend, nursed him in the hospital after an injury, forgiven his infidelity, gave birth to the youngest daughter he begged for, even though his insides were already falling apart back then… The husband was the center of her life, her air and water; even her children, Inga loved less than him. And then suddenly — the switch was turned off. She wanted to live alone.
Everything about her husband began to irritate her. How he rustled around the kitchen for a long time in the morning, how he talked to the cat Bagira as if she understood human language, how he always left a small piece of bread uneaten, letting it dry out on the table, how he threw dirty clothes everywhere and cursed if he didn’t find any clean ones in the dresser. Inga no longer wanted to watch detective shows or bake pies, she suddenly got interested in flowers, which her husband thought were nonsense, and melodramas, which gave him heartburn.
“I’ll go visit my daughter,” she decided when her irritation had piled up to the very throat of her once boundless, sparkling joy, her soul.
“What for?” the husband angrily asked. “Mother-in-law in the house is the fastest path to divorce. Forgot how we almost divorced because of your mom?”
They almost divorced not because of the mother but because while Inga was caring for her paralyzed mother, her husband was seeking consolation from the neighbor Sveta.
“I’m only going for a short while, to see the granddaughter!”
They both missed the granddaughter: the daughter had the child by a Cuban man who didn’t even know he was a father, brought her to her parents, and went off to arrange her personal life. She spent three years arranging it, then came back and took the baby away. Inga cried, not hiding her distress, the husband scolded Bagira as if she had eaten all the butter in the fridge, and lost at cards even to the youngest and greenest players.
“And what about me? Who will cook and wash? Watch out, I’ll go to Sveta—she just became a widow!”
Inga wanted to say, “You scared me! Go to hell!” But she couldn’t.
“Alright,” she agreed. “I’ll call her; maybe they’ll come themselves.”
Inga had given birth to three children, her blood ran in five grandchildren, but still, she felt her trace in this world thinning, becoming transparent. To spite her husband, she began ordering all sorts of flowers and planting them in the garden. Lilac dodecatheons, purple chionodoxas, delicate chaustonias. The husband was angry.
“Why do we need this grass? Better plant more potatoes, then there’ll be something to bake pies with.”
Inga also stopped loving pies. They upset her stomach. She cooked salads and vegetable stews, and the husband complained to Bagira:
“She wants to turn us into herbivores…”
Inga didn’t know anything about divorce. But her daughter-in-law had divorced once and told her a little: something about an application that wasn’t accepted right away, about a court and changing documents. It all seemed too complicated for Inga. But she still called her daughter-in-law and casually asked for details.
“Why do you need that, Mom?” the daughter-in-law was surprised.
“Just curious. Saw it in a movie,” Inga replied.
The husband wasn’t needed for the application. For several days, Inga gathered courage to go to the district center. She made up an excuse: to buy new bulbs. Inga didn’t know how to do it right: whether to say about the divorce first or after she wrote the application.
With her passport and marriage certificate, she walked around the registry office for an hour. She found a double-flowered petunia and a sea cineraria on the flowerbed. An ugly combination. She got upset and went home.
It was quiet at home. The smell of burnt porridge filled the air. Bagira curled up on the table. The husband curled up on the floor. He was pale and unmoving. Inga screamed, but the sounds stuck in her throat, which had long been clogged with irritation. The husband was breathing, she checked. She called the neighbor Vovka. He came running with hands blackened with grease and said the car had broken down. He called his brother, who brought the chairman’s Volga, and the husband was taken to the hospital.
“Stroke,” the doctor said. “They brought him just in time, lucky.”
Inga was sent home. They allowed her to call the intensive care unit and promised everything would be fine. Vasily took Inga back in the chairman’s Volga, awkwardly talked about his grandfather, who also had a stroke and recently got married for the third time.
The melodrama on TV irritated her. Inga switched to a detective series but couldn’t guess who the killer was. She baked pies and asked Bagira:
“Did you eat all the butter? Why is there no butter in the fridge?”
Bagira indifferently flicked her tail and gnawed on a raw potato. She always did that; Inga had never met such cats. Surely, she really understood human speech.
In the morning, no one rustled in the kitchen, no uneaten bread was left, no socks scattered around. Inga woke up at five and lay staring at the ceiling until eight. Then she called the intensive care unit.
“Stable,” they told her.
Inga got up and ate yesterday’s pie, which immediately sank in her stomach and got stuck. The children started calling: the son wanted to come, the eldest daughter asked if there was still a free place next to grandmother at the cemetery, the youngest was crying.
“I thought to bring Mashenka to you,” she complained. “I’m having twins, they want to keep me in the hospital. What should I do now?”
Inga wiped her face, though it was dry, and said:
“Bring her. Dad will be glad, he misses Mashenka. They’ll discharge him soon, don’t worry.”
They didn’t discharge him very soon. Mashenka managed to make a mess in his garage and broke his favorite cup. The flowers also suffered, especially the delicate chaustonias.
“How I missed pies!” the husband declared as soon as he sat at the dinner table. “Well, Bagira, confess—was it you who dropped the tools in my garage?”
Mashenka laughed and said it wasn’t Bagira, it was her. Inga smiled and poured milk for her husband. Inside, a familiar bright spark glittered. She hadn’t stopped loving flowers; she watched melodramas in the evenings when her husband walked with Mashenka, showed her the geese, cows, taught her to fish. Dreams still slipped away immediately, so she listened to her husband’s dreams, which were always detailed and clear as if she saw them herself.