Andrey sat at the kitchen table with his phone and tablet spread out in front of him. Lines of code flickered on the laptop screen, but his mother’s voice was still ringing in his ears. Ten minutes earlier, she had called to tell him that her cat Murka needed special food that cost three thousand rubles. Katya silently placed a cup of tea in front of him and sat down across from him.
“Tamara again?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah. She says Murka is losing weight and won’t eat regular food. She wants me to transfer the money by tonight.”
“How much did you send her last week?”
Andrey rubbed his forehead with his palm and pushed the laptop aside.
“Twelve thousand. Utilities, food, a vet for the dog. And she had fallen behind on her internet bill too.”
Katya pressed her lips together but said nothing. She knew that any comment about her mother-in-law was like striking a match beside a puddle of gasoline. Andrey understood it all himself, but every time the conversation turned to his mother, some ancient mechanism of guilt switched on inside him.
“I just want her to get back on her feet,” he said, avoiding Katya’s eyes. “Just a couple more months. She promised she’d start looking for work after New Year’s.”
“Andrey, New Year’s was four months ago.”
He said nothing. Katya stood up, came over to him, and placed a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m not your enemy, do you hear me? I’m here with you. It just hurts to watch you tear yourself apart.”
“I know,” he said, covering her hand with his. “I know, Katya.”
That evening, he transferred the money anyway. Then he opened his expense spreadsheet and stared for a long time at the numbers forming a very unpleasant picture. Two apartments, two sets of bills, endless requests — and not a single ruble going back in the other direction.
The phone rang again. Tamara’s number.
“Hello, Mom.”
“Andryusha, I’ve been thinking. Maybe I should move in with you? You have that little sofa in the kitchen. I wouldn’t take up much space. And my apartment could be rented out — that would bring in some money.”
“Mom, we live in a one-room apartment. Thirty-two square meters.”
“So what? I’m modest, you know that. And your Katya can make a little room. She doesn’t need an entire closet for all her rags.”
Andrey closed his eyes. Somewhere deep inside, the desire to tell the truth stirred — sharply, briefly, without softening the edges. But he did not say it.
“Let’s discuss it later, okay? I’m buried in work right now.”
“You’re always busy,” Tamara said in an offended tone. “No time for your own mother.”
On Saturday, Tamara showed up without warning. The doorbell rang at seven in the morning, while Katya was still asleep and Andrey had only just made his first cup of tea for the day.
“Mom, you could have called,” he said, opening the door.
“Why should I call? I’m your mother, not a delivery courier. I came — so open the door.”
Tamara walked in, looked around the hallway, and frowned.
“Dust on the shelf again. Does your Katya never clean? In my day, girls knew how to take care of a home.”
“Mom, we both worked until midnight yesterday. We were planning to rest today.”
“Rest? In this mess?” His mother went into the kitchen and looked inside the refrigerator. “Where’s the butter? Normal people keep butter at home.”
Katya came out of the room, sleepy, wearing a stretched-out T-shirt, her hair tied back in a ponytail.
“Good morning, Tamara Petrovna.”
“Good? I don’t see anything good about it. Standing here in some rag in front of an older person. At least dress decently.”
Katya silently picked up a cardigan from the chair and threw it over her shoulders. Andrey noticed how pale her face had become and gently took his mother by the elbow.
“Mom, let’s go to the kitchen. We’ll have tea and talk calmly.”
Over tea, Tamara launched into her usual routine: she complained about loneliness, about noisy neighbors in her building, about the cats feeling cramped in the two-room apartment, about the dog missing long walks in fresh air.
“What I really need is a dacha, Andryusha. A small place outside the city. For the animals. For my health.”
“A dacha?” Andrey nearly choked. “Mom, I can barely manage two apartments as it is.”
“Well, not right this second. But think about it. You’re a smart boy. You earn well.”
“I earn normally. But ‘normally’ doesn’t mean endlessly.”
His mother pressed her lips together, offended.
“So that’s how it is. You’ll buy everything for your Katya, but you begrudge your own mother even a little dacha.”
“I don’t buy everything for Katya. She earns her own money,” Andrey said, trying to keep his voice even. “And I’m not begrudging you anything. I’m saying I have limits.”
“Limits,” Tamara snorted. “There are no limits when it comes to your mother. I carried you for nine months, in case you forgot.”
Katya, standing by the stove, said quietly:
“And then you left him with his grandmother and went away. He was three months old.”
The silence lasted five seconds, but it felt like an eternity. Tamara slowly turned toward Katya.
“And who are you to lecture me? How old are you, twenty? You haven’t seen life, and yet you dare open your mouth.”
“I’m twenty-three,” Katya replied calmly. “And I’m not lecturing you. I’m stating a fact.”
“A fact?” his mother rose from the table. “Here’s my fact: you’re turning him against his mother. Setting him up against me. Before you, he was normal. He called every day and sent money without questions.”
“Mom, enough,” Andrey stood up too. “Katya has nothing to do with this.”
“Of course she has nothing to do with it! Nobody ever has anything to do with anything! It’s always the mother’s fault!”
Tamara grabbed her bag and stormed out, slamming the door so hard that a jacket fell from the coat rack.
For three days after that visit, Tamara did not call. On the fourth, she sent a message: “If you want to make it up to me, bring me a new mattress. My back is killing me.” Andrey read it, put the phone aside, and called his grandmother.
“Grandma, hi. How are you?”
“I’m getting by, Andryusha. Preparing the garden, planting seedlings. But why do you sound so gloomy? I can hear it in your voice.”
“Grandma, tell me honestly. When my mother left me with you, did she ever regret it?”
Nina Petrovna was silent for a long time. Then she sighed, heavily, from the very depths of herself.
“Andryusha, back then she said, ‘I’m eighteen. I want to live. The child can wait.’ And the child was you, three months old, wrapped in a blue blanket. I begged her, ‘Stay at least until he turns one.’ No. She left the next morning. The bus ticket was already in her pocket.”
“And after that?”
“After that she came once every six months. Brought sweets, took pictures with you. And I carried you in my arms at night when your teeth were coming in. I taught you your first word. I taught you to read.”
Nina Petrovna’s voice trembled, and Andrey felt his throat tighten.
“Grandma, I remember everything. Every day, I remember.”
“You are a good man, Andryusha. Too good. That’s your trouble.”
That evening, Andrey sat beside Katya on the sofa and stayed silent for a long time. She did not rush him. She simply sat nearby, sorting pencils for the next day’s lesson.
“Katya,” he finally said. “I’ll go to her tomorrow. I’ll talk to her.”
“What will you say?”
“The truth. That I’m no longer going to support her completely. That I’m ready to help for the first month if she finds some kind of work. Any work. But just paying for everything — that’s over. Full stop.”
“She’ll make a scene. She’ll have a meltdown.”
“Let her. I’ve spent twenty-three years feeling guilty for something I never did. Enough.”
Katya set the pencils aside and looked into his eyes.
“I’m proud of you. Truly. But go all the way.”
“There’s nothing to be proud of. I should have done this a year ago.”
The next day, Andrey stood in the hallway of his mother’s apartment. Three cats circled around his legs, and the heavy breathing of a huge dog came from the room. Tamara was sitting in an armchair, scrolling through a furniture catalog on her tablet.
“Oh, you finally showed up,” she said without looking away from the screen. “Did you bring the mattress?”
“No.”
“Then why did you come?”
Andrey sat down on a chair opposite her and placed a sheet of paper with numbers on the table.
“Look at this. These are my expenses for the past year. The column on the left is my apartment, food, internet, transportation. The column on the right is your apartment, utilities, food, vet bills, pet food, clothes, household appliances.”
Tamara glanced over the numbers.
“So?”
“The right column is one and a half times bigger than the left one. I spend more on you than I do on myself.”
“Well, you’re young and healthy. You’ll manage.”
“Mom,” Andrey linked his fingers together. “Last week, I lost an important job because you asked me to move furniture and go buy cat litter. The client went to someone else. That was serious money.”
“So what? One job.”
“Not one. The third in two months. Because every time I need to focus, you call with a request. Urgent, unavoidable, mandatory.”
His mother put the tablet down and looked at him for the first time during the entire conversation.
“Are you presenting me with a bill? I gave birth to you, and now you’re presenting me with a bill?”
“You gave birth to me and left me with Grandma three months later. Grandma raised me. And for the past year, I’ve been trying to be your son, provider, mover, and wallet all at once. I’m tired. I’m very tired.”
His mother jumped up from the armchair.
“This is all your Katya! She’s turned you against me! You were never like this before her!”
“I wanted the mother I never had. Before her, I was just silent. Those are not the same thing.”
“So you’re abandoning me, is that it? Like your father? He left and walked away?”
“Mom, my father left because you didn’t even tell him my name. Grandma told me.”
His mother froze with her mouth open. Then she slowly sat back down.
“So she ran her mouth about that too,” she hissed. “Well, thank you, Mommy.”
“Don’t touch Grandma,” Andrey’s voice became quiet and firm. “She is the only person who has never betrayed me. The only one who got up with me at night. Who took me to my first school ceremony. Who cried when I moved away.”
“So I betrayed you, then?”
“You didn’t betray me. You simply didn’t choose me. Not then, and not now.”
His mother jerked her chin upward.
“You speak beautifully. Did Katya teach you that?”
“Life taught me.”
He stood up and zipped his jacket.
“I will pay for this apartment for one more month. During that time, you need to find work. Any kind. I’m not asking the impossible, Mom. Just stand beside me, not on my shoulders. If nothing changes in a month, I stop paying. And there will be no extra money anymore.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“I’ve already decided. And this isn’t a threat. It’s a fact. The very kind you don’t like hearing.”
He left, carefully closing the door behind him.
The month passed quickly. Tamara did not look for anything — she did not update her résumé once, did not go to a single interview. But every week she sent voice messages calling Andrey ungrateful, cruel, and heartless. She referred to Katya only as “that snake” and “that homewrecker.”
On the thirtieth day, Andrey stopped transferring rent money.
A week later, Tamara called. Her voice was sugary and soft, like melting ice cream.
“Andryusha, my son, let’s talk like human beings. I can’t manage alone, you understand. I’m scared.”
“I offered you a specific plan. A month. You did nothing.”
“I was sick! My back, my blood pressure, my nerves after the things you said.”
“You have insurance. You have a clinic. I even paid for an appointment with a good doctor in March, remember? You didn’t go.”
“Because I don’t trust those doctors!”
“I did everything I could. Now it’s your turn.”
Tamara was silent for a minute. Then her voice turned icy.
“You’ll regret this, Andrey. I’ll tell everyone what kind of son I have. All my acquaintances, all the neighbors. I’ll post about it online. You’ll look like a monster.”
“Post whatever you want,” he said calmly. “I have bank statements for the past year and a half. Every transfer, every receipt, every bill. If anyone wants to know the truth, I’ll show them. And don’t forget to mention how you abandoned me and then came back demanding money. Very touching.”
Tamara hung up.
Three weeks later, she moved out of the apartment, taking the cats and the dog with her, and went back to the village. Andrey learned this from the landlord, who called to say that someone had scratched the word “traitor” into the hallway wall.
That evening, he told Katya about it.
“A scratch can be painted over,” she said. “A conscience cannot. And yours is clean.”
“You know what’s strange? It doesn’t hurt. I thought it would hurt. But it just feels empty. Like I’d been carrying an unbearably heavy box, and it turned out to be filled with newspapers.”
“Newspapers with someone else’s headlines,” Katya smiled faintly. “Come on, let’s have dinner. I made pasta with sun-dried tomatoes.”
They ate in silence — not a heavy silence, but a soft, homely one.
Two weeks later, Nina Petrovna called.
“Andryusha, sit down.”
“I’m sitting, Grandma. What happened?”
“Your mother arrived. Said she would live with me since you ‘threw her out.’ Walked in, put her suitcases in the corners, let the cats loose in the rooms. The dog knocked over my cactus.”
“And what did you do?”
“I told her, ‘Tamara, this is my house. I am the mistress here. You are a guest — and only because of my kindness. If you want to live here, you live by my rules. You get up at seven, help around the house, and within a week you start looking for work.’ She looked at me as if I were explaining higher mathematics to her.”
“And?”
“She lasted three days. On the fourth morning, I came into the kitchen and found her opening my little box. The one where I keep the money I saved. I was putting it aside for winter — firewood, medicine. Twenty-eight thousand. Tamara was standing there counting the bills.”
Andrey slowly exhaled.
“Grandma, did she take it?”
“She didn’t have time. I came in quietly. She didn’t even hear me. I said, ‘Put it back.’ She said, ‘Mom, I was just looking. You’ve saved up so much. What do you need all that for?’ I said, ‘Because I worked for thirty years, raised a grandson, and counted every kopeck. Put. It. Back.’”
“Did she?”
“She did. Then she called me a greedy old woman and said she was leaving. I answered, ‘Good riddance. But if you touch my things without permission one more time, I’ll tell the whole village how you tried to steal from your own mother’s box. Everyone knows everyone here, Tamara. After that, you won’t even be able to walk into the shop.’”
“Grandma, you’re made of steel.”
“I’m not made of steel, Andryusha. I endured things for thirty years — enough. You taught me that, by the way.”
“I did?”
“You did. When you stopped staying silent, I stopped too.”
Two days later, a message came from Tamara’s neighbor in the village — a woman Nina Petrovna had known all her life. The message contained a photo of a notice Tamara had posted on the local board: “Looking for a sponsor to move to a warm climate. Woman, 42, no bad habits, with three cats and a dog. Call anytime.” At the bottom, the phone number was circled with little hearts.
Katya read it and silently showed it to Andrey. He looked at it, snorted, and deleted it.
“So that’s the whole story,” he said. “She didn’t need a son. She needed someone who would pay.”
“You know what,” Katya suddenly brightened. “Let’s move Nina Petrovna in with us. We’ll rent a two-room apartment and give her her own room.”
“Grandma won’t come. She’d die defending her vegetable garden.”
“But we can try, can’t we?”
They tried. And, to Andrey’s complete astonishment, Nina Petrovna agreed — not immediately, only after a week of thinking, and with conditions: the seedlings were coming with her, and once a week she would cook borscht for everyone.
When Grandma arrived, Katya met her with a bouquet of wild daisies bought at the market. Nina Petrovna stood in the hallway — small, thin, holding a suitcase tied with a clothesline — and said nothing.
“Grandma, what is it?” Andrey asked, stepping closer.
“I’m thinking, Andryusha. Once, someone left me a child because he wasn’t needed. And now that child is taking me in because he needs me. So that happens too, apparently.”
Katya turned away because the tears came faster than she could blink them back.
And Tamara? Tamara eventually did find her “sponsor” — an elderly farmer from a neighboring district. A month later, he returned all her cats, her dog, and her suitcases after discovering that Tamara could not even fry an egg and categorically refused to do any housework. The final straw came when she tried to sell his walk-behind tractor on a classifieds website “because it was old and probably useless anyway.” The farmer was a man of few words: he carried her things out onto the porch and hung a sign on the gate that read, “No vacancies.”
Tamara ended up exactly where she had feared being all her life — alone with herself. With no audience, no wallet full of someone else’s money, and no victim willing to offer up his back for her to stand on.
And in the apartment shared by Andrey, Katya, and Nina Petrovna, the air smelled of borscht. Seedlings grew green on the windowsill, and in the evenings Grandma taught Katya how to knit — crookedly, unevenly, with loops of different sizes. They laughed, and that evening laughter was the most precious sound Andrey had ever heard.