Katya arrived in the village on the first minibus, at half past seven in the morning. She carried two bags in her hands and a backpack on her shoulders. Inside the backpack were a jar of stuffed cabbage rolls, a package of medicine for her father, and a new pair of socks she had knitted over two evenings while Solomiika was doing her homework.
Maria Dmytrivna saw her daughter through the window and came out onto the porch in her dressing gown, just as she was.
“Katya, why are you here so early? We told you we could manage on our own.”
“Mom, Dad was breathing on the phone yesterday like he was carrying a sack of cement. What do you mean, ‘manage on your own’? Where is he?”
“In the garden. Digging potatoes. He says they’re forecasting rain, so he wants to finish before it starts.”
Katya put the bags on the bench, changed into her father’s old rubber boots that always stood in the entryway, and went behind the house.
Tymofii Ivanovych was standing over a row of potatoes, leaning on his shovel and staring somewhere toward the shelterbelt. When he saw his daughter, he straightened up as if she had caught him doing something embarrassing.
“Oh, the inspector has arrived.”
“She has. Give me the shovel, Dad. And don’t argue.”
He didn’t argue. He sat down on an overturned bucket and, for the first time that morning, let out a long breath.
Maria Dmytrivna would remember that October morning for a long time afterward. Because it was then, watching her delicate Katya turn over one potato bush after another, that she finally admitted something honestly to herself: she and Tymofii had always lived as though they had two children, but only one of them really counted.
Oleh had been born first, and somehow the best of everything always went to him. Not out of cruelty. It had simply happened that way. He was the boy, the one who would carry on the family name, their hope for the future.
He got a new jacket every autumn, while Katya wore her cousin’s old coat, whose sleeves had already become too short by the second year. Oleh was bought a brand-new bicycle from Poltava. Katya was told girls didn’t need bicycles because she would only scrape her knees.
When Oleh finished school, he wanted only Kyiv, only economics, and only the university they talked about on television. His grades were not high enough for a state-funded place.
Tymofii Ivanovych sat at the kitchen table that evening, calculated something for a long time on the back of a calendar, and finally said:
“We’ll pay. We’ll rent out the apartment in Poltava to students and sell the pig. I’ll work extra shifts on weekends too. We’ll manage.”
And they did.
For five years Maria Dmytrivna bought herself almost nothing except stockings.
Three years after Oleh, Katya finished school. She had always studied better than her brother. Her mathematics teacher even came to their house and begged her parents not to waste the girl’s talent.
But there was no money for a second tuition contract.
“Sweetheart, go to technical college,” her mother told her, unable to look Katya in the eyes. “Train as an accountant. There will always be work. And later, maybe you can continue studying part-time.”
Katya was silent for a moment, then nodded.
“All right, Mom. Oleh still needs to finish university too.”
She never returned to that conversation again. Not once did she reproach them.
Maria Dmytrivna waited for that reproach for years. Once she even tried to bring it up herself, but Katya simply waved her hand.
“Mom, leave it. Everything is fine with me.”
“Fine” meant a one-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Poltava that Katya had already been renting for eight years.
It meant a job as an accountant at a small company selling building materials.
It meant her eleven-year-old daughter Solomiika, a serious girl who wore her hair in braids.
Katya’s husband had left when the child was not even three, and ever since then Katya had handled everything alone.
She visited her parents every week. Not because anyone asked her to. She simply got on a minibus with Solomiika every Saturday morning and came to the village.
Sometimes she brought fish, sometimes medicine, sometimes new curtains for the kitchen because, as she put it, “yours have turned completely yellow.”
She set up a smartphone for her mother and patiently explained for the third time how to answer a video call.
When the temperature climbed close to forty degrees that August, she brought her parents a fan and then spent another hour scolding her father because he had climbed onto the roof to repair the slate.
Sometimes Maria Dmytrivna quietly slipped five hundred hryvnias into the pocket of Katya’s coat.
The following Saturday, those same five hundred hryvnias would be sitting in the sugar bowl.
“Katya, why do you keep doing this?”
“Mom, how much is your pension? Exactly. Buy yourselves something. I earn money.”
And Oleh…
Oleh called on holidays.
On his father’s birthday, he sent a greeting card through a messenger app, one of those pictures with a glittering cake and flowers.
He visited once a year, in summer, for two days.
Inna, his wife, would step out of the car in white sneakers and the first thing she asked was whether the house had decent Wi-Fi.
That spring, Tymofii Ivanovych decided to repaint the fence and the window shutters. His back no longer allowed him to do the work alone, so Maria Dmytrivna called her son.
“Oleh dear, come for the weekend and help your father. It’s one day’s work if there are two of you.”
“Mom, I don’t know. I need to talk to Inna. I think we already had plans.”
“What plans, son? Your father is seventy-two.”
“Mom, I said I’ll talk to her. I’ll call you back.”
He called that evening.
His voice sounded guilty, but also strangely rehearsed.
“It won’t work, Mom. Inna already booked us a weekend at a resort and paid the deposit. Maybe hire someone? I can send three hundred hryvnias.”
Maria Dmytrivna said, “Don’t bother,” and ended the call.
But at eight o’clock on Saturday morning, Katya was already standing at the gate in old jeans, carrying two paintbrushes she had bought on the way.
She and her father painted until dark.
Solomiika handed them the cans and sang songs from cartoons.
That evening, Tymofii Ivanovych sat on the porch staring at the freshly painted green fence.
He was silent for a long time.
Then he said quietly to his wife, making sure Katya could not hear from the kitchen:
“Maria… we never even asked her what she wanted back then.”
Maria Dmytrivna said nothing.
She only nodded.
The apartment in Poltava—the same one they had once rented out to pay for Oleh’s education—had always been considered their son’s future property.
That was simply how things had come to be.
“It will go to Oleh. He has a son growing up,” Tymofii Ivanovych had been saying for perhaps ten years.
Katya had heard it.
And never said a word.
In July, Oleh and Inna arrived unexpectedly on a Wednesday without calling first.
They brought a cake and expensive coffee beans, although there had never been a coffee machine in the house.
They sat at the table, and after his second cup of tea, Oleh slowly approached the subject.
“Dad, Mom, we’ve been thinking… The apartment is going to be mine anyway. Maybe we should transfer it now? Then later we won’t have to run around dealing with notaries. We actually need to sell it, add some money, and buy something bigger in Kyiv. Artem will finish school soon, and before you know it, he’ll want to get married.”
Tymofii Ivanovych put down his cup.
“And when will you come visit your mother and me? After we transfer it?”
“Dad, what does that have to do with anything? I do visit.”
“Once a year.”
Inna put her hand on her husband’s knee and smiled that particular smile that always made Maria Dmytrivna feel cold.
“Tymofii Ivanovych, we work. We live in Kyiv. We have our own rhythm. Surely you understand.”
The conversation ended without any decision.
His father said he would think about it.
Oleh shrugged.
Inna went outside to make a phone call.
That evening, Maria Dmytrivna went to the summer kitchen to get a jar of cherry jam for them to take home.
The door was slightly open.
Behind it, on the bench beneath the grapevine, her son and daughter-in-law were sitting together.
Maria stopped when she heard her own name.
“…they won’t do anything,” Inna was saying. “Your father is stubborn, but he’ll sign. The important thing is making sure your Katya doesn’t get there first and fill their heads with nonsense.”
“Katya won’t do anything,” Oleh replied lazily. “She’s our saint, remember? Let her keep coming here, fussing around them, digging potatoes. It’s not like she has anything better to do. But the apartment is mine. They promised it to me when I was still in school.”
“And what happens when they get worse? Someone will have to look after them.”
“Katya will do it. I’m not going to keep driving back and forth from Kyiv. Or we’ll find some kind of care home. There are plenty of them now.”
Maria Dmytrivna carefully placed the jar on the windowsill so it would not make a sound.
Then she quietly returned to the house.
She and Tymofii did not sleep that night.
She repeated everything she had heard, word for word.
He listened while staring at the ceiling.
Then he said only one thing:
“So… ‘Katya will take care of them.’”
Oleh and Inna left the next morning.
His mother carried out the jam and hugged her son as usual.
He did not even notice how straight and unnaturally calm she was.
On Monday, Tymofii Ivanovych put on an ironed shirt, shaved, and went with his wife to Poltava to see a notary.
A week later, they asked Katya to come not on Saturday, but on Friday evening.
A folder lay on the table.
Tymofii Ivanovych pushed it toward his daughter.
“What is this, Dad?”
“The apartment. It’s yours now. We signed it over to you as a gift.”
For a long time, Katya did not touch the folder.
Then she looked up at her parents, and there was so much confusion in her eyes that Maria Dmytrivna could not bear it and turned toward the window.
“But… what about Oleh? You always said it was his.”
“We did,” her mother replied softly. “We said a lot of things, sweetheart. And there was a lot we failed to see. Forgive us. For the technical college. For that coat. For everything.”
“Mom, what are you talking about…”
“Be quiet,” her father said.
Unexpectedly, he took his daughter’s hand in his rough palm.
“Just once, let us do something for you first. Solomiika needs a room of her own. And you need a place where no landlord can throw you out in the middle of the year, like that one did last winter.”
Katya began to cry.
Quietly, almost like a child, covering her face with her hands.
Solomiika came up from behind and wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck, not fully understanding what had happened, but sensing that it was something very good.
Oleh found out a month later.
He was not the one who called.
Inna did.
“Maria Dmytrivna, have you completely lost your mind? You always loved Katya more—everyone knew it! Oleh spent all these years counting on that apartment, and you…”
“Inna,” Maria Dmytrivna interrupted calmly. “We loved Katya less. That is the truth. We simply realized it too late. And I never gave you that jar of jam from the summer kitchen, because I heard what the two of you were saying beneath the grapevine.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
Then Inna snapped:
“Well, in that case, don’t expect to see either us or Artem again.”
She hung up.
Maria Dmytrivna held the phone in her hand for a little while longer.
It hurt, and she did not try to deny that even to herself.
A son was still a son.
She still kept his graduation photograph on the windowsill—the one where he was wearing the same suit that had cost her and Tymofii half a month’s salary.
But now another framed photograph stood beside it.
Katya and Solomiika were standing in the doorway of the apartment in Poltava, Katya holding a new key in her hand.
For the first time in many years, her daughter was smiling as though she had nowhere she needed to rush to.
On Saturday morning, the gate creaked open again at half past eight.
“Mom! Dad! I’m here! Show me what’s wrong with that roof of yours!” Katya called from the yard.
Tymofii Ivanovych smiled and went to open the gate.