“Listen, Yan, let’s go to my parents’ place this weekend! There’s a sauna, a river, we can grill some kebabs, relax properly! I’m slowly getting fed up with this city!” Anton suggested to his wife. “What do you think about it?”
“Anywhere but your parents’, Antosh. I don’t want to listen to your mother lecturing me again! I know how to live my life without her! I hate it when a stranger tries to teach me!” Yana replied to her husband.
“What do you mean by ‘stranger’? My mother is a stranger to you?” the guy was surprised. “So am I a stranger to you too?”
“Why do you have this habit of twisting everything I say?! I didn’t say a word about you! And your mother, yes, she is a stranger and an outsider to me, as hurtful as that sounds to you! And it will never be otherwise! But you’re my husband, and I love you! At least when you’re not talking nonsense!” his wife answered.
“I’ll remember that!” Anton said offended. “And after that kind of attitude, don’t complain to me if my mom is rude to you! You deserve that kind of treatment since she’s a stranger to you!” The husband stood up from the sofa and left the living room with a hurt look.
“Oh, really! Well, thanks, my dear, for the support! But next time your mom is rude to me, I’ll answer her the same way, and just try to say something to me!” Yana shouted after her departing husband. “And I’m not going anywhere! If you want, go to your mommy yourself, I’ll find something to do at home!”
“And what will you do?” Anton came back. “Read your books some more?”
“What’s wrong with books?” the girl was surprised. “If you want to know, they’re way more interesting than most people! And I’d rather read a book at home, warm and cozy, without feeling like an outsider, and without that constant contemptuous look drilling into my back!”
“Got it!” Anton replied.
“Well, since you got it, good for you!” Yana sarcastically praised her husband. “Don’t forget to grab a pie from the shelf! Spoiled brat!”
After this little quarrel, the couple didn’t talk to each other for a couple of days. Anton deliberately appeared in front of his wife and constantly acted dissatisfied with something. Yana thought he was just trying to get her attention. She ignored him and paid no mind to his antics. Such episodes had happened in their young family more than once, and she knew everything would soon pass, Anton would stop sulking, and they’d forget it all.
Closer to the weekend, Anton stopped sulking and spoke to his wife. He tried again to persuade Yana to go with him to his parents. But the girl refused outright. So Anton went to his parents alone. And Yana, as her husband expected, stayed home for the weekend and buried herself in an interesting book.
When Anton returned to his mother and father on Sunday evening, he missed his wife very much. He started talking to Yana by apologizing for his recent behavior. It happened just as the girl thought.
Then, after a short pause, Anton told Yana that he had settled all the problems and misunderstandings between her and his mother.
“By what means, I wonder?” Yana asked him.
“The simplest!” the husband replied. “I just talked to her, and she promised never to nag you again! Won’t try to teach you how to live, and… well, she won’t pick on you over trivial things anymore!”
“I don’t want to offend you, dear! But honestly, I don’t really believe it, especially knowing your mom! I don’t think she really listened to you; I think she just played along so you’d leave her alone!” Yana said.
“Why do you always start like that, Yan? How can you judge if you weren’t there during our conversation?”
“It’s just that, Antosh! I’ve met people like that before! After you talked to her, she only got angrier at me—I’m a hundred and fifty percent sure of it! You’ll see!”
“I’m telling you, she won’t bother you anymore! I know my mother, and if I ask her for something, she’ll do it no matter what! What she promises, she keeps!” Anton kept insisting.
“I’ll tell you about one incident from school!” the girl said. “There was an English teacher in sixth and seventh grade—an awful woman! The whole school hated her! As a teacher, sure, she was good at her subject, but as a person, I probably never met anyone worse!
“What does my mom have to do with this?” the guy wondered.
“Just listen, then make your conclusions!” his wife asked. “This teacher constantly tried to impose her opinions on everything, even outside her subject. If someone argued with her, she could insult or even hit them! It was nothing to her! She targeted me and a few others in my class! She humiliated us, yelled at us, argued until she lost her voice!
“What did she argue about?”
“That’s not important now!” Yana answered. “The point is, parents and the principal tried to influence her. My mom talked to her about five times, maybe more! For the first two or three lessons after that, she might not yell at me or provoke me, but she did other nasty things—paid extra attention in a different way without yelling! But after those lessons in her office, she seemed to forget the conversation with my mom and continued to pick on me, teach me life lessons, and yell the whole lesson! And your mom, excuse me, Antosh, is almost identical to that old English teacher of mine! You can tell me whatever you want, but she will never leave me alone so easily! So don’t even try to convince me to go to the village with her! I won’t go!”
“Come on, Yana!” Anton grumbled. “Let’s go next weekend and check it out! If you’re wrong, I’ll grant you any wish, and you have to fulfill it! Deal?”
“I’m not going anywhere, I just told you! What, you’re like a child? I’m not going to go just to prove something to you!”
“Are you scared you’ll lose the bet?” Anton tried to tease his wife.
“No, Anton! I’m afraid our relationship might be ruined, especially if you’re wrong! And I don’t want that!” Yana answered.
Yana stood firm, and Anton left her alone with his idea for a few days. But by the next weekend, he convinced her to visit his parents. She resisted at first but finally agreed.
When they arrived at Anton’s parents on Saturday morning, his mother, Darya Alekseyevna, indeed paid Yana excessive attention. From the start, she spoke very sweetly, almost sickeningly, to her. She didn’t blame or interfere in Anton and Yana’s relationship. But it was obvious she really wanted to get to Yana but tried to hold herself back in front of her son.
The first day went quite well. No one insulted Yana even once. At dinner, the mother even tried to take care of her daughter-in-law, although a bit excessively—either putting something wrong in her plate or too much of something. It was clear she was trying to provoke Yana deliberately.
Yana pointed this out to Anton several times, but he just brushed it off, defending himself and his mother, saying Yana was just imagining things.
The next morning, Anton’s younger sister, Irina, came to visit. Like Darya Alekseyevna, she didn’t particularly like Yana. The reasons weren’t revealed—it was just mutual dislike.
Late morning, or closer to noon, when the family gathered again at the table, Irina began asking Yana awkward and unpleasant questions.
“Listen, Yan,” Ira said, “is it true that girls only get jobs at your office by sleeping with someone? How did you get your position?”
Anton, hearing his sister’s question addressed to his wife, instead of stopping her, decided to see how Yana would answer.
“Where did you even get that idea? Who told you such filth?” Yana was surprised.
“It doesn’t matter who!” Ira answered. “It’s just a rumor!”
“Believing rumors means not respecting yourself!” Yana replied.
“Well, still?” Irina continued. “How did you get your job? Like they say?”
The girl lost her appetite after those questions. She looked carefully at her husband, expecting support, but he pretended to be interested in something in his salad and didn’t raise his eyes.
“Why are you silent?” Darya Alekseyevna jumped into the conversation. “Answer Ira’s question! We’re all very interested!”
“I got the job like everyone else! I sent a resume, passed an interview, and was hired! What else do you want to hear? How and with whom I slept for this position? Is that what interests you? And you too?” Yana addressed her husband.
“Yan, why do you always start like this?” Anton replied. “They just asked a normal, simple question! Is it so hard to answer calmly?”
“Seriously?” Yana smirked. “You think that’s a normal question? She’s trying to provoke me into a fight on purpose!” The girl pointed at her husband’s sister. “Do you understand this is meant to make us quarrel, Anton?!”
Meanwhile, Ira and her mother smiled quite contentedly. Only Anton and Irina’s father sat in such a way as to be neither seen nor heard.
“I don’t get it! Nobody’s trying to make us quarrel! Irina just asked a question! And you immediately take it offensively!”
“You know what that means?” the mother asked her son.
“That the thief feels guilty!” Irina smiled.
“Anton, I want to go home! Let’s leave here, please!” Yana begged. “I told you going here with me is a very bad idea!”
“Who do you think you are, ordering my son around?” Darya Alekseyevna interrupted. “He’s not going anywhere! You’ll leave in the evening!”
“I’m not going anywhere in the evening!” Yana sharply replied to her mother-in-law. “I want to go home now! And I’m not going to adjust to you! You don’t decide when and where we go!”
“Talk to me again like that, you little brat!” Darya Alekseyevna yelled. “I don’t care where you want to go! I said Anton leaves only in the evening! If you don’t like it, pack up and go to the bus stop! And don’t you dare boss my son around! You rude girl!”
“Yan, seriously! What else is there to do at home? Let’s go as planned, in the evening!” Anton appealed to his wife.
Yana looked at everyone, especially at her husband’s cowardly gaze in front of his mother. She sharply got up from the table and started packing her things.
“Sit down quickly!” her mother-in-law shouted.
“Shut your mouth, or you’ll cover the whole table with your poisonous saliva!” the daughter-in-law answered. “You’re my mother-in-law, not my mother, so don’t yell or give orders. Teach your daughter better, and your son who still can’t get out from under your skirt! And if you open your big mouth at me again, I’ll shut it fast! And I don’t care that you’re older than me! Go teach those lives!” Yana pointed at Anton and Ira.
No one expected such a turn of events. Not even Anton had ever seen Yana in such a state. While they sat digesting her speech, Yana quickly grabbed her backpack, checked its contents, left the house, and actually headed to the bus stop, from which, according to the schedule, a bus to the city should leave in about forty minutes.
Her sister-in-law and mother-in-law shouted all sorts of curses after her. Irina even wanted to catch up in the first few minutes and scold Yana for such words about her mother. But she came to her senses, or rather chickened out, because on the road, no one would have protected her from her sister-in-law. And she would have gotten a beating.
Anton didn’t want to upset his mother, so he really went home only in the evening. But when he arrived at their rented apartment where he and Yana lived, it was pure chaos. Everything was scattered, or rather, all his things were scattered. And Yana’s things were nowhere to be found. A few hours before his arrival, Yana with her good friend and her husband, who had a micro truck, had moved all her things from the car to her mother’s apartment.
And Yana left Anton a note in the most visible place. In the middle of the living room, Anton saw one of his favorite white T-shirts with a message carefully written in black marker:
“I took my things and am moving to my mother’s. I don’t want to see you. Don’t even think about showing up at my place. Tomorrow I’m filing for divorce. Thank yourself, your mother, and your narrow-minded sister. I want nothing to do with you and your crazy family anymore!”