If hypocrisy could be turned into electricity, my husband Sergey could have powered a decent-sized steel plant all by himself. He moved through life absolutely convinced that the world was one grand stage, with him cast as the wise patriarch and everyone else assigned the role of grateful extras handing him props.
That particular talent of Sergey’s — loving duty only when someone else had to perform it — showed itself especially clearly after his mother, Valentina Viktorovna, slipped on the season’s first ice and broke her arm. It was a bad fracture, displaced, which meant surgery and a long recovery with proper care.
“Tanechka, this is our burden to carry!” my husband declared theatrically, pacing around the living room in his underwear, one sock, and a nest of messy hair. “We have to stand together! A family is one living organism!”
“An organism,” I agreed calmly, pouring myself some coffee. “And which part of this organism is going to clean her bedpan and cook her broth?”
Sergey froze as if I had suggested he eat a cockroach.
“Well… Lena will go! She’s her daughter, after all. Women are born for this — compassion, care, all that…”
But Lena had inherited the same family gift Sergey had: the ability to vanish into mist the second the word problem entered the room. On the phone she announced that she had a complete intolerance to hospital smells.
“What a snake!” Sergey snapped, throwing his phone onto the couch. “Abandoning her own mother! No conscience at all. Tanya, you’re different, aren’t you? You’re a real Human Being, with a capital H.”
“I’m also a working human being, Sergey. With a five-day workweek.”
“But Mom needs care!” He flung up his hands so wildly he nearly clipped the chandelier. “She can’t be alone! And driving across the city every day — traffic, gas, stress…”
“Are you suggesting we bring her here?” I looked him straight in the eye.
Sergey lit up.
“You’re a genius! Of course! Your guest room is empty anyway. You’ll look after her — women understand each other better. And I… I’ll hold down the fort! Provide moral support!”
Sergey’s version of “holding down the fort” consisted of lying on the couch and issuing valuable instructions while I carried the bags.
Valentina Viktorovna, a woman forged from steel and Soviet-era construction, arrived in our apartment with the expression of an inspector sent to audit a failing collective farm. Our relationship had never been warm. To her, I was “too independent.” To me, she was simply “too much of a mother-in-law.”
The first few days felt like a cold war. Sergey tactically removed himself from active duty. Every evening after work, he would step into his mother’s room, put on a mournful expression, and ask:
“How are you, Mom? Hanging in there? You’re such a hero.”
“I’m hanging in there,” Valentina Viktorovna would answer dryly, staring at her cast. “I’m thirsty.”
“Tanya!” my husband would immediately yell from the hallway without even attempting to walk to the kitchen. “Tanya, Mom needs water! With lemon! Hurry, dehydration is no joke!”
I would silently bring the water. By then Sergey was already planted in front of the TV, fully convinced that he had performed his sonly duty at one hundred and fifty percent.
One evening, while I was changing my mother-in-law’s bandage — the doctor had already removed the cast, leaving only support wrapping and dressings — Sergey wandered into the room with a sandwich.
“Tanya, you’re holding the bandage wrong,” he mumbled through a mouthful of food. “It should be at a forty-five-degree angle. I saw it in a movie.”
I turned my head slowly.
“Sergey, if you don’t disappear right now, I’m going to use a move on you that I also saw in a ninja movie. And that angle will be ninety degrees.”
He choked on his sausage and retreated, muttering that “women have become way too aggressive.” Valentina Viktorovna, who usually just pressed her lips together in moments like that, suddenly gave a quiet snort.
“You’re not the type to let anyone walk over you, Tatyana. You’d bite their whole arm off.”
“Respect, Valentina Viktorovna, is not paid for with silence,” I replied, tightening the knot. “And my patience is not endless.”
She studied me for a long moment. For the first time, there was no familiar disapproval in her eyes. Only exhaustion and… interest.
As spring approached, Sergey began circling more and more aggressively around the subject of the dacha. My mother-in-law’s country house was a good one: sturdy home, garden, and most importantly, a pond full of carp where Sergey loved to “commune with nature” by sitting with a fishing rod and a beer.
“Mom,” he would begin sweetly, settling onto the edge of her bed, “it’s going to be hard for you to manage all that now. Your arm, your age… Maybe you should transfer the dacha to me. I’ll take care of everything, and you can just relax. Smell the roses.”
Valentina Viktorovna stayed silent, gazing out the window.
“I’m your only son,” he went on, and there was so much eager hope in his voice it sounded like he had already started grilling kebabs on land he considered his. “Who else would you leave it to? Lena doesn’t care about gardening. She’s too ‘spiritual’ for that.”
My mother-in-law turned her eyes toward me. At that moment, I was ironing her laundry.
“And what does Tanya think?” she asked suddenly.
“Tanya?” Sergey waved his hand dismissively, as though brushing off a mosquito. “What does Tanya have to do with it? This is family property, ancestral stuff! Tanya’s a city woman — offices are more her thing.”
I said nothing. There was no point arguing with a man whose logic bent whichever way suited him. But I noticed Valentina Viktorovna narrow her eyes slightly, as if taking aim.
Then March 8 arrived.
Sergey approached that holiday like a man preparing for a decisive battle. He was convinced the fate of the dacha would be settled that very day.
That morning he floated grandly into the kitchen.
“My girls! My beloved ladies!” he declared in the tone of a game-show host. “Happy spring and beauty day!”
Then he pulled out a huge box from behind his back and handed it to me.
“This is for you, Tanechka! The latest cleaning set! A turbo-spin mop, a wheeled bucket, and five microfiber attachments! So you won’t get tired making our little nest cozy!”
I looked at the “gift.”
A mop. For Women’s Day.
“Thank you, darling,” I said through my teeth, feeling a volcano begin to stir inside me. “Very symbolic. Message received: a woman’s place is next to a bucket.”
“Oh, come on, don’t start,” he pouted. “It’s thoughtful! It’s technology!”
Then he turned to his mother. His face shifted into an expression of almost sacred reverence. He took out a velvet jewelry box.
“And this is for you, Mom. You’re our queen, and queens should wear gold.”
Inside lay a pair of heavy gold earrings with rubies. I recognized them immediately — he had shown me a photo from the jewelry store. The price had been outrageous. And the money had come from our joint savings account, the one we were putting aside for a vacation. “Just borrowing it,” he had said the day before when I found the bank text alert.
Valentina Viktorovna took the box in her good hand. She looked at the earrings. Then at my mop. Then at Sergey’s radiant face.
Silence settled over the room. From the kitchen, the dripping faucet sounded like a countdown to disaster.
“They’re beautiful,” my mother-in-law said quietly.
“Of course they are!” Sergey beamed. “I drove all over town! Nothing is too much for my beloved mother! So, Mom, have you thought about the dacha? The season’s almost here… We’ll sign the papers, and I’ll fix the fence right away.”
Valentina Viktorovna slowly snapped the velvet box shut. The click sounded like a gunshot.
“Sergey,” she said, her voice calm enough to send chills down my spine, “do you really think I’ve lost my mind?”
His smile disappeared.
“What do you mean, Mom?”
“I mean exactly what I said. You give your wife a bucket so she can haul out my waste more comfortably, and you give me shiny trinkets bought with her money so I’ll sign my land over to you?”
“Mom, what are you talking about?” Sergey flushed dark red. “That’s from my savings! I was trying to do something nice!”
“Nice for whom?” Valentina Viktorovna stood up. For the first time in three months, she no longer looked like a frail elderly woman. She looked like the iron lady the whole building had always been afraid of. “I’ve been living here for three months. I’ve seen who cooks my soup, who washes me, who gets up at night when my arm starts aching. And I’ve seen who does nothing but wag his tongue and dream about carp.”
“I work! I get tired!” Sergey shrieked, his voice cracking into a high pitch.
“Tanya works too,” she cut him off. “Only unlike you, she has a conscience. You, my son, have a calculator where your conscience should be. And even that calculator is broken.”
She set the jewelry box on the table and pushed it toward him.
“Take it back. Return it. And buy your wife a real present. And that mop…” She looked him over with a mixture of disgust and pity. “You can use it to wash the floor of your car. Maybe then there’ll be less dirt in your soul.”
Sergey stood there in silence. The world he had built in his head — where he was the noble provider and everyone owed him gratitude — shattered into pieces like broken glass.
“Mom… you’re humiliating me…” he whispered.
“I’m not humiliating you. I’m raising you. Late, yes, but better now than never.”
The next morning, Valentina Viktorovna put on her good coat and announced:
“Tatyana, start the car. We’re going.”
“Where?” I asked in surprise.
“To the notary.”
Sergey, who had been glumly drinking coffee in the kitchen, immediately perked up.
“Mom? You changed your mind? I’ll come with you!”
“Sit down,” she cut him off with one word. “We can manage without extra whining.”
At the notary’s office, Valentina Viktorovna moved quickly and decisively. When the notary read out the deed of transfer, my breath caught in my throat.
“Valentina Viktorovna,” I whispered, staring at the papers. “There’s a mistake. It has my name on it.”
“No mistake,” she said, signing firmly with her good hand. “The dacha is yours. The house and the pond too.”
“But Sergey… he’s your son…”
“Exactly because he’s my son, I know him inside out. Give him enough freedom and he’ll dump me in a nursing home the second I become inconvenient, and leave you with nothing as well. But you, Tanya, are dependable. I can see that. You didn’t abandon me, even though I’ve made your life difficult more than once. Consider this… compensation. For moral damages. And for having to deal with my overgrown child.”
We stepped outside into the March sunlight, which was so bright it hurt my eyes.
“Only one condition,” she said, pulling on her gloves. “Don’t tell Sergey whose name it’s in yet. Just say the dacha issue has been settled. Let him stew for a while.”
That evening Sergey met us with a fawning smile.
“Well? Did you do it?”
“It’s done,” Valentina Viktorovna said dryly as she walked to her room.
“Finally!” Sergey threw up his arms triumphantly. “Justice has prevailed! Now we can really start living! I’ll put in a sauna, clean up the pond… Tanya, did you hear? The man of the house is officially the owner now!”
I looked at him and felt a strange mix of pity and laughter. He was rejoicing like a child who had found a candy wrapper and thought he had the candy itself.
“Yes, Sergey,” I said with a smile, remembering the notary’s words. “The dacha definitely has a real owner now.”
For an entire month he made plans, sketched vegetable bed layouts, and bragged to his friends about being a landowner. And when the truth finally came out — completely by accident, when the tax documents arrived in my name — his face turned the exact shade of stale beetroot that suits people who have greatly overestimated their own importance.
The scandal was monumental. He shouted about betrayal, about a female conspiracy, threatened to move in with his mother — forgetting that his mother was still living with us.
But Valentina Viktorovna said calmly:
“Go ahead. My apartment is empty. Just remember, Sergey: my pension is small, I still can’t cook, so you’ll be feeding yourself. And you’ll be paying the utilities too.”
Sergey looked at us, then at his “turbo-spin mop” standing sadly in the corner, and silently went off to the bedroom.
To cry into his pillow.
Greed is a remarkable vice: it blinds people to what is right in front of them. When you think you’ve got life by the throat, most of the time you’re only clutching your own tail and running in circles. And sometimes it is very полезно when life smacks you across the nose with that tail.