— Marry him? Him?”
Her mother’s voice, Zinaida Borisovna’s, was as dry as an old crust and cracked with disbelief. It hung in the air of the tiny kitchen, thick and viscous like cooled jelly.
“Masha, are you out of your mind? Do you understand who we’re talking about?”
Masha didn’t answer right away. She was looking at the bright, almost screaming geranium on the windowsill. The whole place, this entire Khrushchevka, soaked through with the years, smelled of that intrusive flower and something sour that had eaten into the walls—either the old furniture or her mother’s constant, unspoken anxiety.
“His name is Alexey. And yes, Mom, I’m perfectly sane. I’ve never felt so calm and sure.”
“He might as well be called Innokentiy!” her older sister Svetlana exclaimed, sweeping into the kitchen with the air of a judge delivering a sentence. “Masha, have you even looked at him? I mean properly looked? He’s… well, you know very well. He’s got this… specific aroma about him.”
Svetlana demonstratively wrinkled her perfectly refined nose, turning toward the old mirror in its heavy frame as if seeking confirmation of her own rightness there.
“He smells of the street,” Masha said quietly but very distinctly. “Of the wind. Of cold November air. Not of malice and not of envy.”
“Oh, we’ve got a saint here!” Svetlana snorted, adjusting a strand of hair that was already perfect. “A savior of the poor and downtrodden. Mom, just listen to her, she’s going to make us the laughingstock of the whole town! A disgrace! What will people say?”
Zinaida Borisovna pressed her thin lips together. Her usually tired gaze turned sharp and prickly, like needles.
“People will say that my younger daughter, a smart and pretty girl, has tied her fate to a man of no fixed address. To the dregs of society. To a bum, Masha.”
That word cut through the air, dropping to the floor like an icy lump.
Masha just drew a deeper breath, feeling the familiar lump rising to her throat. The very same lump that accompanied all her conversations with her family. She realized it was useless. They didn’t see—and didn’t want to see—what she saw. They refused to make out the person behind the shell of his circumstances.
The story of their meeting was simple and had nothing to do with fairy tales. Masha had run away from home after yet another exhausting argument with Svetlana—who was, yet again, lecturing her on how to live, how to dress, whom to talk to and what to dream about. Masha was sitting on a cold bench in the little park by their building. It was already getting dark, the damp November wind chased last year’s leaves along the ground, and she was swallowing bitter, heavy tears, trying to hide her face in the collar of her coat.
He sat down on the very edge of the same bench, keeping a respectful distance. Motionless, in some ridiculous, drafty dark jacket far too thin for late autumn. Masha tensed instinctively, waiting for the usual, memorized request “for some bread.” But he stayed silent. He just stared straight ahead, at the bare, crooked branches of an old maple, and there was such endless weariness and resignation in his posture that Masha’s heart clenched not from fear, but from something completely different.
Ten minutes probably passed. The dusk thickened around them.
“The wind is freezing today,” he said suddenly, without looking at her. His voice was low, hoarse from a cold or from silence, but there was a deep, hidden strength in it. “You could catch a chill. Sitting on the cold like this is dangerous.”
Masha slowly raised her eyes to him. His face was weather-beaten, covered with gray stubble, his nose slightly crooked. But his eyes… his eyes were strikingly clear, light and deep. Intelligent. There was no plea in them, no servility.
“I don’t care anymore,” she muttered, wiping her wet cheeks with her palm.
“That’s a shame. ‘I don’t care anymore’ is the deepest pit there is. Climbing out of it later is incredibly hard. Almost impossible.”
And that was how, with that strange sentence, they started talking.
He didn’t complain, didn’t ask for pity. He just told her things. A little, in fragments. About how he once had a small but his own woodworking shop in a neighboring region. How he trusted his partner, his cousin, completely. How one very not-fine day he discovered he had been left without the shop and without the apartment he had mortgaged to get loans to grow that same business.
“It’s my own fault,” he said then, studying his cracked, scratched hands, blackened from ingrained dirt and varnish. “I should have read the papers more carefully instead of taking his word for it. Trust is a bad business partner.”
Masha started bringing him food. At first sandwiches, then hot meals in a thermos. Then, when the frosts set in, her father’s old but warm clothes. And then, quite unexpectedly for herself, she realized she was looking forward to these short, mostly silent meetings. For the first time in her life no one was lecturing her, trying to remake her. She was simply being listened to. And he listened the way no one ever had— with every fiber of his being.
“He’s not trash, Mom. He’s… he’s the most real person I’ve ever known.”
“Real?” Svetlana squealed, her voice ringing like a crystal bell about to crack. “Is this ‘real one’ going to live here? In Mom’s apartment? Breathing the same air as us?”
“I’m registered here,” Masha said firmly, for the first time in a long while. “This is my home too. I have the right.”
“Oh, so you’re asserting your rights now!” Svetlana shouted. “New times indeed! Dragging a vagrant into the house so he can eat at the same table with us!”
“We’ll rent a room of our own,” Masha cut across her, feeling a hot wave of resolve spreading up her spine.
Zinaida Borisovna clutched at her heart with the well-practiced dramatism of a seasoned actress.
“She’ll spend her savings on him! Every last penny! On a drunk!”
“He doesn’t drink,” Masha said sharply, looking her mother straight in the eye. “At all. Not a drop.”
“They all say that!” Zinaida brushed the words aside with a flick of her hand, as if sweeping away invisible dust. “Masha, come to your senses, I’m begging you. You’re a young, attractive girl. Study, work. Find yourself… a normal man. With a proper job. With his own place. With prospects.”
“I don’t need someone else’s apartment. I don’t need someone else’s prospects. I need him.”
The silence that followed these words felt like an explosion. The air seemed to shudder and thicken.
Svetlana turned pale, her painted lips parted in shock.
“You… you’re serious? You’ll really marry that… that?” She couldn’t even find a word. “Everyone will laugh at you, not just the family, the whole town! We’ll die of shame! I won’t even be able to go to work, everyone will be pointing at me!”
“You’re free to laugh,” Masha slowly rose from her chair, feeling the ground sway under her feet, but her voice stayed level and steady. “You’re free to burn with shame. That’s your choice. I love him. And I am going to marry him.”
She turned and left the kitchen. The heavy, sweet-and-sour smell of geranium and old varnish on the furniture followed her like a ghost.
She went into what used to be her room, now more like a storeroom, and opened the door of the shared wardrobe. On the very top shelf, under a pile of her childhood bed linen with little bunnies, lay a flat, overstuffed kraft-paper envelope. Inside was the money she’d secretly saved from each of her modest paychecks for the past three years. Her “untouchable reserve.” A ticket to some other, unknown life.
Svetlana stood in the doorway, silently watching her, her gaze heavy and condemning.
“You won’t get a single kopeck!” her mother shouted after her, appearing from the kitchen. “Do you hear me, Masha? Not a kopeck from my house! No help at all!”
Masha shoved the envelope into the inside pocket of her simple coat and began pulling on her worn boots. Her hands shook slightly, but not from fear or doubt. From sheer tension, from the overwhelming determination that filled her.
“I don’t need your pennies, Mom. The only thing I need is your blessing. Since I don’t have that, well… so be it.”
She pulled on the heavy front door handle.
“You’ll crawl back to us!” Svetlana cried out harshly, almost tearing her voice. “Covered in bruises and tears, just you wait! When that guy robs you down to the last thread and dumps you in the gutter!”
Masha stepped out onto the landing into the cool air of the stairwell, smelling of dust and damp concrete.
“I won’t crawl, Sveta. Ever.”
The door banged shut behind her with a loud, final click, like the sound of a book slamming closed.
Their new life began in a room on the very edge of the city. An old, shabby five-story block, top floor. The view from the window—another such gray wall and a narrow scrap of sky.
The room was as narrow as a pencil case, with a sagging sofa that served as a bed, and a rickety, rattling wardrobe. The wallpaper was stained with greasy spots and strange streaks. But it was their place. Their fortress.
The first thing Alexey did when he stepped over the threshold was start cleaning the only window. It was thickly plastered over with old yellowed newspapers, and the room was sunk in a perpetual, dreary twilight. He carefully peeled off the paper, centimeter by centimeter, scraped away ridges of paint with a knife, and when the last filthy scraps fell to the floor, the room was flooded with pale, cold, but wonderfully life-giving December light.
Masha watched and couldn’t help smiling.
“It’s like… there’s more air now. More space.”
“There has to be light,” Alexey said seriously, gazing at the clean glass. “That’s the main thing.”
He himself was slowly changing before her eyes. Masha insisted on taking him to an inexpensive but tidy barber’s, bought him simple, clean second-hand clothes. A padded jacket, sturdy boots, new jeans.
And from under the layer of gray stubble and the tangle of long unwashed hair, a different man appeared. Tired, with deep lines at the corners of his eyes that spoke of all he’d been through, but with a strong, determined chin and a high forehead.
He no longer smelled of the street and stale alcohol. Now he smelled of simple cheap soap and fresh frosty air that he brought in on his clothes.
Their shared kitchen, though, smelled entirely different. It smelled of other people’s unfamiliar food. Fried cabbage, scorched sunflower oil, dampness from the basement and a quiet, small-scale hopelessness. The neighbors—an eternally exhausted woman with a crying baby and a quiet, overworked student—barely looked at them, buried in their own worries.
Masha quickly found a job as an administrator in a small, almost intimate fitness club on the other side of the city. The commute took more than an hour, the pay was tiny, but it was money.
Alexey didn’t sit idle. He took any job, no matter how dirty or poorly paid. He unloaded trucks at the market at night, shovelled snow in courtyards, fixed plumbing and sockets for the neighbors in the building for symbolic sums.
He came home late, dead on his feet, and silently put a few crumpled bills and coins on the old chest of drawers. His entire wage. Down to the last kopeck.
In the evenings, if they still had the strength, they sat in their cramped kitchen with cups of tea, eating simple buckwheat with canned stew.
“You get so tired,” Masha would say anxiously, glancing at his reddened fingers, rubbed raw.
“Any work is honorable, Masha. The only dishonor is idleness and giving up.”
He never complained. Not about fatigue, not about pain, not about the injustice of fate.
About a month after they’d left, the phone rang. Svetlana. Her voice was artificially sweet, honeyed.
“Mashenka, sweetheart, how are you there? How’s your… life? Still alive and well? Mom is so… so worried. She can’t sleep at night.”
“We’re alive, Sveta. We’re fine. Everything’s okay.”
“Really? Well, I happened to be driving past your area, and I thought I’d drop by, see how you’re doing. Of course I found out your address… I have my sources. Go on, I’m almost there, come meet me.”
Masha went cold. She didn’t want these visits, that poisonous compassion.
Svetlana walked into their room and froze on the threshold.
She was wrapped in an expensive mink coat, waves of heavy, cloying designer perfume rolling off her and instantly filling the tiny “pencil case,” smothering the modest smells of soap, buckwheat and sour cabbage from the kitchen.
Her mocking, appraising gaze slid slowly over the worn-out sofa, the old kettle on the stool, the modest plate of dinner on the table.
“Oh,” Svetlana theatrically covered her mouth with a gloved hand. “How cute. Very… Spartan. Ascetic.”
“Come in, since you’re here,” Masha said evenly, feeling the blood rush to her cheeks.
“I won’t stay long, I just… brought this.” She set a heavy, fancy bag from an expensive supermarket on the table. “Mom asked me to. There’s… well, some food. Good cheese, Italian, dry-cured sausage… You look so drawn, so pale.”
This was a thousand times worse than outright screaming or a fight. This was humiliation masked in the thinnest layer of concern and care.
“Thank you. You shouldn’t have bothered,” Masha answered dully.
“Oh, please, it’s nothing, we’re family, we’re close, we must help each other in hard times.”
At that moment Alexey came home from work. He stopped short in the cramped hallway, in his clean but old, worn jacket.
“So… that’s him, then. Alexey,” Svetlana drawled, running her disdainful gaze over him from head to toe. “Well, hello.”
“Hello,” he replied, calm and even.
Her gaze was sharp as a scalpel. She studied him, taking in every detail of his appearance, searching for flaws.
“Well, Masha,” she drawled again, turning back to her sister. “Happy now? Is this what you dreamed of? To give up your home, your family, all comfort for… this questionable existence?”
“I’m happy, Sveta. And I’m asking you to leave.”
“But I want to help! Sincerely!” Svetlana’s voice suddenly jumped into a high, hysterical note. “Mom cries at home! And I tell her—it’s her own fault, she chose this herself, she walked to the very bottom on her own, willingly!”
“This isn’t the bottom,” Masha said quietly but very distinctly. “This is our life. Our life with Alexey. And it’s only just beginning.”
“Life?” Svetlana laughed bitterly, anger trembling in her laughter. “In this… hole? In this dorm? With a former—”
“Leave,” Masha repeated, firmly opening the front door.
Svetlana pressed her lips into a thin line, and for a second her beautiful, groomed face was twisted into a hideous grimace.
“You’ll crawl back to us. I’m absolutely sure of it. When your ‘prince’ starts drinking again and stops working. Can’t wait for that day!”
She swept out, head held high, leaving behind a heavy cloud of expensive perfume and a ringing, oppressive emptiness.
Masha silently looked at the bright bag of delicacies sitting on their modest table.
Without a word, Alexey took the bag, went out into the common hallway, and put it by the door of their gloomy neighbor with the baby.
“We’re not starving. We don’t need handouts,” he said quietly but very firmly when he came back.
That evening he sat for a long time at the table, his big, scratched, calloused hands resting on the worn tabletop.
Masha sat opposite him in silence, understanding that any words now would be superfluous, would only get in the way.
“She… your sister… She’s right about one thing,” he said at last, without lifting his eyes.
“About what?” Masha asked softly.
“I’m dragging you down. I’m a loader. A janitor. A man with no future. I’m nobody. And I’m next to you.”
Masha stood up, came over and sat beside him. She took his big rough hands into her small warm ones.
“You’re a carpenter. A true craftsman.”
He slowly raised his eyes to her. In his clear, light eyes there was pain and doubt.
“That was… a very long time ago. In another life. Everything I had is gone. All that’s left are these hands.”
“The hands are exactly what’s left,” Masha said stubbornly, squeezing his fingers. “And your head on your shoulders. That’s what matters most. They’re always with you.”
He looked at her for a long time, and slowly something in his gaze changed, the ice of despair melting, the first shoots of hope pushing through.
“I… I’ve been thinking all this time. At night, when I can’t sleep.”
“What have you been thinking about?”
“I can make furniture. Not just stools. Chairs. Tables. Shelves. Not cheap, soulless mass market. Real things. Alive. From good, real wood. I know where to get quality material for little money. I remember how it’s done.”
He spoke in jerky phrases, hurriedly, for the first time in all these months letting her see a little piece of his inner world, his secret hopes.
“But for that… I need tools. Just the bare minimum to start. At least a handheld router. An electric jigsaw. A planer. Good chisels.”
Masha got up. She went to their old wardrobe and pulled out that same, already slightly tattered envelope from under her folded underwear. All her savings. Everything she had.
She put it on the table in front of him.
Alexey recoiled as if he’d seen a snake.
“Masha. No. That’s… yours. It’s all you’ve got. Your chance at another life.”
“It’s all ours,” she corrected him, looking straight into his eyes. “Our chance. For our own tools. For our own business.”
“And if… if it doesn’t work out? If I lose everything again? If I let you down…”
“You will make it,” she cut him off, not letting him finish. “I know you will. I don’t doubt it for a second.”
He stared at the shabby envelope as if it were a burning coal, afraid to touch it.
“You… you believe in me. More than I do in myself.”
“I don’t ‘believe’ in you. I’m sure of you. That’s not the same thing.”
Alexey slowly, almost reverently, laid his big rough palm over the envelope.
“All right. I’ll do it. I won’t let you down.”
Their first “workshop” looked like anything except a place where beauty is born. It was an old, half-collapsed garage in a far-off industrial zone, crammed with rusty junk and reeking of gasoline and mold. For two days they hauled out mountains of rusty cans, broken parts and rotten boards.
Alexey brought in the second-hand machines he’d bought. Used, a bit rusty here and there, but, as he insisted, functional. He’d picked them up for almost scrap-metal prices.
And now he spent nights in the garage, going through every bolt, oiling mechanisms, adjusting and tightening.
Gradually, the garage filled with entirely new, unfamiliar smells.
It no longer stank of gasoline and damp. Now it exuded the fragrance of fresh wood shavings, pine resin, the scent of hot varnish and linseed oil.
The first six months were a real test of endurance.
Masha still worked at the fitness club. But now, after her shift, she took two buses out to the industrial zone, to their garage. She brought him hot dinners in a thermos, helped hand-sand boards, kept a thick notebook she called “the accounts,” trying to make sense of expenses and the almost non-existent income.
Alexey practically lived in the garage.
He slept in snatches, three or four hours at a time, on an old discarded mattress they’d found by the dumpsters and covered with a clean throw.
His hands, once just red and chafed, had become powerful, calloused and strong. There was real confidence in them now.
And finally he made his first chair.
It wasn’t just a piece of furniture. It was an object with a soul poured into it. Made from solid oak, with an elegantly curved back, perfectly fitted, smooth, warm, alive.
“What are we going to do with it?” Masha asked, running her palm over the silky surface of the wood in awe.
“Sell it,” Alexey replied, looking at his creation with a hint of sadness, like a father seeing a grown child off into the world.
Masha took a photo of the chair with her old phone, its screen cracked, and, barely breathing, posted an ad on a free online marketplace.
She hardly dared to hope for any response.
But three days later, the phone rang.
A respectable man in a pricey German SUV came, spent a long time silently examining the chair, feeling the wood, clicking his tongue in surprise.
“Where are you bringing these in from? Italy, by any chance?”
“From a garage on the edge of town,” Alexey chuckled.
The man looked attentively at Alexey, at his hands, at the modest, well-worn machines, and nodded.
“I’ll take it. Name your price.”
Masha, trembling slightly, named a sum that seemed astronomical to her. The man counted out the money without bargaining.
And as he was leaving, he turned back and said:
“Can you make a dining table for me? In the same style? And a set of six of these chairs? For my new restaurant. I like the energy in them.”
That was their first serious order.
They worked on it for almost three months. All of their modest profit from selling that first chair went into buying good-quality wood.
They were back to living on buckwheat. But now it was different buckwheat. It tasted different. It was theirs.
When Alexey delivered the order and that same restaurateur shook his hand and counted out a stack of bills, he and Masha just sat there in their garage on a giant heap of oak shavings, silently looking at each other.
“We… we did it,” Masha whispered at last, her voice unsteady.
“We’re only just starting, Mash. This is just the beginning,” Alexey corrected her, but the same joy was shining in his eyes.
He didn’t run out to buy himself a new coat or new boots. He bought a newer, better planer. And arranged to rent the neighboring garage to store finished pieces and materials.
Soon Masha quit the fitness club.
She became the full-fledged manager of their small but proud “company.”
She created a social media account. She named it simply and meaningfully: “Alexey’s Workshop.”
She taught herself to take professional, attractive photos of their work. She learned how to negotiate with clients, draw up contracts, organize delivery.
She posted pictures of his new creations online. They were no longer just chairs—they were graceful armchairs. Not just tables—solid sideboards and dressing tables. Every piece he made, he poured so much soul and patience into it as if it were the last one he’d ever make.
Orders started coming one by one. At first one or two a month. Then every week.
A year later they were able to rent a small but bright and dry hangar in the same industrial area.
Alexey took on his first assistants—two young guys he picked himself, teaching them the craft from scratch.
He was no longer “that homeless guy.” To clients and apprentices he was now Alexey Viktorovich. The Master.
He still wore simple work clothes, but now they were clean, sturdy and comfortable.
They finally moved out of that room in the dorm into a modest but their own one-room apartment in a residential neighborhood. With a real separate kitchen and their own bathroom.
For the first time in two years, Masha bought herself a new dress. A beautiful one. Not from a second-hand store.
They barely spoke to her family. Svetlana called now and then to ask, dripping sarcasm, how things were going.
“So what, Mashka, millionaires yet? Made a fortune on your little chairs?”
“We’re working, Sveta. We’re doing fine.”
“Sure, sure, work yourself to the bone. Just don’t rupture something. Mom sends her regards. Says she’s still waiting for you to finally wise up and come back.”
Masha would quietly hang up, avoiding arguments.
Time passed. Another six months went by.
One evening Alexey came home later than usual. He wasn’t just tired—he seemed somehow… different. Focused and at the same time lit from within.
He walked straight into the kitchen, where Masha was making dinner.
“Mash. Sit down, I need to show you something.”
“What is it, Lyosha? Problems with an order?” she asked nervously.
“No, everything’s fine. I… I went to see one place today.”
“A place? For a new workshop? Is the hangar too small again?”
“No. Not for the workshop. For us. For our family.”
He put a glossy, full-color brochure on the table in front of her.
On the cover was a picture of a beautiful, cozy two-story cottage in a suburban settlement. With large panoramic windows, a terrace and a neat plot for a garden.
Masha stared at the brochure, uncomprehending.
“What’s this? An ad for some neighborhood?”
“It’s a house, Mash. Our house. I want to buy it. For us.”
At first, Masha laughed, thinking it was a joke.
“Lyosha, seriously? Did you look at the price? It’s… it’s a fortune. We don’t have that kind of money. We’ve only just gotten on our feet.”
“We do,” he said quietly but with great certainty. “I’ve counted everything. To the last kopeck. We can. We can afford a down payment. The rest… we’ll take a mortgage. And we’ll manage.”
Masha looked at him, at his serious clear eyes glowing with unshakable confidence.
“I want you to have your own garden. For you to plant flowers. For you to never again have to smell someone else’s fried cabbage in a shared kitchen or listen to other people’s rows.”
Masha covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t hold back the tears; they ran hot and salty between her fingers.
“Lyosha… this is…”
He pulled her into his arms, pressing her to his strong, reliable chest.
“You believed in me when I was nobody. You gave me everything you had, all of yourself. I have no right not to give you the whole world. Or at least a little corner of it.”
They bought the house a month later.
It took several more months to get it into shape, make it cozy and fully livable. Alexey did almost everything with his own hands, just like in the old days.
He barely slept at night: planing, painting, laying tiles in the bathroom, installing lights. His workshop in the hangar hummed like a beehive, churning out urgent, well-paid orders to cover the mortgage payments.
And Masha planted.
She planted roses, peonies, lavender, apple trees and cherry trees. She breathed in the smell of fresh, damp earth, and it was the most wonderful fragrance in the world to her.
The smell of her mother’s old apartment, that ingrained odor of geranium and constant, gnawing anxiety, was gone forever, dissolved in the past.
The smell of that room in the communal flat—sour cabbage and someone else’s uncomfortable life—faded like a terrible, heavy dream.
Their new home smelled of pine shavings that Alexey brought in on his boots, of wood varnish and future apples.
One Saturday Alexey asked Masha to come outside.
In front of the gate, on the newly laid paving stones, stood a car. Not new, but well kept, a bright cherry color. A ridiculous but touching huge bow sat on the hood.
Masha gasped.
“Lyosha? What’s this?”
“You’ve spent too much time riding buses to that industrial zone, in the rain and snow,” he said simply. “Enough. This is yours. Your freedom.”
He put the keys in her palm and closed her fingers around them.
For the housewarming, after long hesitation, Masha called her mother and invited her and Svetlana over.
She felt she had to. Not to show off or humiliate them. For herself. To put a period at the end of that chapter. To shut that heavy door to the past.
They came.
Svetlana stepped out of the taxi and froze on the spot. She stared at the two-story cottage, at the tidy lawn, at the cherry-colored car parked by the gate. Her face, usually so smooth and well-kept, flushed with red blotches, and her lips trembled.
Zinaida Borisovna just stood there silently, crossing herself over and over, her eyes wide as she stared at the house.
Masha came out onto the porch to greet them. She wore a simple linen dress, her skin tanned, her expression peaceful and smiling.
“Come in, dear guests. Welcome to our home.”
Alexey, clean-shaven and wearing a new light shirt, was setting the table out on the big veranda. The huge oak table he himself had made a year before.
Svetlana walked into the house without a word.
She touched the walls, ran her palm along the stair rail. She looked at the large, bright kitchen-living room, which was bigger than their entire old apartment. She saw the furniture—those very pieces of solid wood made by her brother-in-law’s hands.
She stepped into the bathroom and saw the expensive Spanish tiles and modern fixtures.
“Must be drowning in mortgage debt, huh?” she managed to say at last. Her voice was strained and hoarse.
“No,” Masha smiled gently. “Lyosha and I don’t like living in debt. We calculate everything.”
“Then where… where did all this come from?” Svetlana swept her arm around the room. “Did you steal it? Find a treasure?”
“Alexey earned it. With his own hands,” Masha replied simply, ignoring the venom.
“On chairs?” Svetlana couldn’t resist a sarcastic jab.
“On chairs,” Alexey nodded calmly, entering the room. “And on tables. And armchairs. And carved boxes. Please, come to the table, Zinaida Borisovna, everything’s ready.”
They sat on the veranda. It was warm; the air smelled of grilled meat and fresh herbs.
Mother ate and cried. Quietly, silently. Whether out of relief or the shock that her younger daughter had actually been right, even she couldn’t have said.
Svetlana barely touched her food. She just pushed the salad around her plate with her fork.
She watched Masha. Her calm, confident movements. Her husband, who poured her fresh juice with gentle care.
She saw a man who looked at her sister with endless adoration, respect and tenderness.
And she couldn’t help remembering her own husband, Egor, who at that very moment was probably sprawled on the sofa watching TV and yelling for her to bring him a beer.
“So the car is… also from the chairs, I suppose?” she finally snapped, letting a note of sarcasm creep back in.
“The car is for Masha,” Alexey answered evenly, without irritation. “So she doesn’t have to freeze at bus stops or be shoved around on public transport.”
Svetlana set her fork down with a loud clatter.
“Well then, Mashka. Congratulations. You drew your lucky lottery ticket. Luck smiled on you.”
“This isn’t a lottery, Sveta. And not luck.”
“Then what is it?” Svetlana was practically hissing now, her self-control cracking. “You found a dirty bum at the dump, washed him, dressed him up… and what do you know, he had golden hands. Who could’ve guessed!”
Masha looked at her sister. And for the first time in her life she felt neither anger, nor resentment, nor even annoyance. Only a light, detached pity.
“I guessed. I always knew. That, Sveta, is the whole difference between us.”
Svetlana went white, as if someone had doused her with icy water.
They didn’t talk about money or success anymore that evening.
Her relatives left quickly, citing urgent business.
Masha stayed behind to clear the table.
Alexey came up behind her, slipped his arms around her shoulders and pressed his cheek to her hair.
“Well? Regret inviting them? Was it hard?”
“No,” Masha shook her head, looking out at her garden bathed in moonlight. “They don’t pity themselves, why should I pity them?”
She turned to him and put her arms around his neck.
“Remember, back then on that bench in the park, you said that ‘I don’t care anymore’ is the deepest pit?”
“I remember. Like it was yesterday. You were sitting there crying.”
“You climbed out of your pit. And pulled me up with you.”
“No, Mash,” he said, gently brushing her cheek with his familiar rough, calloused palm. “We climbed out together. Hand in hand. Because together, we’re strong.”
He was still the same man she had once met on that cold November bench. Honest, straightforward, real.
It was just that now, everyone else could see it too.