Luba stopped at the gate and froze. Soft music was drifting from the house, a melody whose cheerful rhythm somehow carried a dark, ominous undertone.
She looked at Vanya, and her husband’s brow furrowed.
“Did you give the key to anyone?” he asked, tension in his voice.
“No. Never.”
Luba slowly opened the gate and stepped into the snow-covered yard. The snow was already trampled, clearly marked with footprints leading to the door; she counted at least five or six different pairs.
Someone had arrived here recently with a large group.
They had owned this plot in Vyritsa for thirty years. The house had been built by Vanya’s father, and later they continued the work themselves: they added the veranda, the second floor, and the sauna.
The children knew where the spare key was hidden under the porch, but they always called before coming. That was the family rule.
Vanya stepped onto the porch first. Luba followed, her eyes fixed on the living room windows.
Shadows moved behind the curtain — someone was walking inside, perhaps even dancing. Luba recognized the outline of the cabinet where her mother-in-law’s porcelain set was kept, and her heart tightened with a sense of foreboding.
They had come to Vyritsa to check the pipes. Every February Vanya insisted on this trip, because fifteen years earlier they had skipped the inspection, and a pipe in the basement had burst from the frost.
They had to replace the entire system, and since then Vanya trusted neither the weather nor luck.
Meanwhile, Luba had planned to take some jam from the cellar pit. The grandchildren loved strawberry, and the Maslenitsa celebration was only two weeks away.
Sonya and Misha, the twins, had turned four in January. Luba remembered every detail of that day:
Maxim, her son, had carried the cake out of the kitchen himself, lit the candles, helped the children blow them out, cut the cake, and placed the slices on plates.
Alla, his wife, had sat in the corner of the room the entire time with her phone in her hands. She approached the children only once, when one of the guests wanted to take a family photo.
She smiled at the camera, kissed Misha on the top of his head, and then sat back down on the couch.
Luba had remained silent then. She had grown up in a family where it was not customary to speak about relatives behind their backs.
Her mother always said: either tell a person to their face, or keep it to yourself. But what could she have said to her daughter-in-law?
That she was a bad mother? That she was not interested in her children?
Luba did not feel she had the right to say that, because Alla could have replied: “And who are you to teach me?”
Yet with each passing month, it became harder to remain silent.
Vanya opened the door, and Luba stepped inside the house.
The hallway smelled of smoke and something sweet, reminiscent of cherry. Foreign coats lay scattered across the floor.
A glossy leather woman’s handbag hung on the key hook.
Luba entered the living room and saw them.
Six or seven people were lounging around the room as if they owned it. Two girls sat on the couch, and a short-bearded young man stood by the window, a glass in his hand.
Another person sprawled in Vanya’s armchair, where her husband usually sat to watch television. Bottles stood on the table, plates with leftover cheese and sausage, and an improvised ashtray made from a gaudy blue-and-white patterned coffee cup.
Alla was sitting on the armrest of the other chair. She wore a short black dress clearly unsuited for a winter country house, and high heels.
She held her glass and laughed at something one of the girls had said.
When Luba entered, Alla looked up and stopped laughing. An expression of annoyance appeared on her face, like a child caught misbehaving.
“Oh,” she said, without getting up. “You were planning to come next weekend.”
“We can come any weekend,” Vanya replied calmly, though Luba could hear the tension in his voice. “This is our house.”
“Explain what’s going on here!” Luba demanded.
Alla shrugged.
“We decided to relax with friends. What’s wrong with that?”
“Did you ask for permission?”
“From whom? You?”
The short-bearded young man snorted and turned toward the window. One of the girls rolled her eyes and whispered something to her friend.
Luba did not hear the words, but the tone told her enough: nothing good.
“It’s impossible to breathe in here,” Luba said.
She tried to speak evenly, without emotion, because she knew that if she started shouting, she would not be able to stop.
“It just needs airing out.”
Vanya walked to the cabinet and opened its door. Luba saw the change in his face.
Two cups from the formal porcelain set were out of place, and one had a broken handle. The set had belonged to Luba’s mother-in-law.
“This is my mother-in-law’s porcelain,” Vanya said, his voice trembling. “It’s practically museum-worthy.”
“Oh, come on,” the young man replied. “Who needs that junk? You can buy new ones at any Ikea.”
Luba saw Vanya clench his fists. In forty years of marriage, she had learned to read his body better than his words.
He had never raised a hand against anyone, but now he was close.
“Young man,” Vanya said slowly, pronouncing each word carefully, “you are in someone else’s house.”
“Oh, dad, relax,” Alla said, getting up from the armrest. “Don’t dramatize. Nothing terrible happened.”
“I am not your father,” Vanya shouted. “I am your husband’s father. And I want to know: where are Sonya and Misha right now?”
The question caught Alla off guard. She froze for a second, her glass suspended midair.
“At home, of course. With Maxim.”
“Does Maxim know you’re here?”
Alla did not answer. She set her glass on the table, crossed her arms over her chest, and looked down at her mother-in-law, though she was a head taller.
Luba stepped closer. She looked at her daughter-in-law, trying to understand what was happening in her mind.
A thirty-year-old woman with two small children, throwing a party in someone else’s country house on a weekday. Her husband at work. Where were the children?
“Alla,” Luba said quietly so only she could hear. “You have four-year-old twins. They cannot cook their own food.
They don’t understand why their mother left or when she will return. How could you leave them for the sake of a party?”
“They’re with their father. Maxim took a day off. Everything’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
Alla did not answer. Luba saw the expressions on the friends’ faces change.
Moments ago they had looked at the homeowners with mockery. Now there was curiosity — perhaps even judgment — in their eyes.
“Fine,” Alla said loudly, clapping her hands. “Everyone, let’s go. The old folks are right, we shouldn’t have come here. Let’s continue somewhere else.”
The group gathered their things within ten minutes. Luba stood in the kitchen doorway, watching as the guests put on their coats, searched for their phones, and finished the remaining wine straight from the bottles.
No one said goodbye, apologized, or offered to help clean up.
Alla left last. She paused at the doorway and turned back.
“I told them we shouldn’t come here,” she said. “But they insisted. It’s not my fault.”
Luba remained silent. She had long noticed this trait in her daughter-in-law — always shifting responsibility onto others.
The friends were to blame, the circumstances, the weather, the husband, the mother-in-law — anyone but Alla herself.
The door closed. Luba heard car doors slam outside, engines roar, tires crunch against the packed snow.
A few minutes later, everything fell silent.
Vanya walked to the window in the living room and pulled the curtain aside. The red taillights glowed faintly along the snowy road, then disappeared around the bend.
“What will happen now?” Luba asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe court. Some kind of evaluations. Maxim will handle it.”
“And the children?”
“They’ll stay with their father. At least for now.”
Luba sat down at the table and buried her head in her hands. She felt drained, hollowed out, as if every ounce of strength had been pulled from her.
The day had begun with a simple trip to the country house to check the pipes, and it ended with her son’s family falling apart.
“Are we to blame?” she asked. “If we hadn’t come today, none of this would have happened.”
“It would have happened. Sooner or later.
You’ve seen how she treats the children. This wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t have been the last.
Maxim should have taken action long ago.”
