“Just peanuts, son,” she replied, surprised at how easily she lied to her child, her not-so-flesh-and-blood. “About one hundred and fifty thousand. I’ve set it aside for medicine, for my funeral…”
“One hundred and fifty thousand?” The disappointment in his voice was almost palpable. “Oh, well then. I thought maybe it was something more serious, I could help you invest it…”
“No, son, nothing serious.”
Anastasia hung up and sat for a long time in the darkening kitchen, listening to the drip of the faulty faucet that no one was around to fix. She remembered everything: how her son had lied about a promotion at work, how he had borrowed her pension and never returned it, how he would arrive empty-handed and leave with full bags, how he once let it slip while drunk that he had lost twenty thousand at the slot machines.
“He can’t be trusted with money,” she decided then. “He’ll blow it in a week. But my daughter-in-law, that quiet girl Vika with the sad eyes he brought for inspection two years ago, she might need it when Valerka shows his true colors.”
She put the bank statement in the same tin box with the adoption papers and buried it deeper, pressing it down with the potato box on top.
Viktoria married Valery three years ago. A modest wedding at the civil registry office of the Industrialny District, a reception at the ‘Dnieper Wave’ cafe for twenty people, most of whom were her relatives, as only the groom’s mother came from his side. They took out a mortgage for a one-bedroom apartment in a panel building on Titov Street (an ironic coincidence with her husband’s surname) in both their names, but Viktoria made the down payment of two hundred thousand hryvnias from her premarital savings. At the time, it seemed right. They were a family, after all, everything was shared, he was her husband and would be forever.
She worked as an economist at a small construction firm, earning twenty thousand, and believed that Valery, a mid-level manager at a machine-building plant, honestly brought home his thirty thousand. She tried not to think about where the money went, why he would ask her for a loan until his next paycheck at the end of the month. A crisis in the industry, delays, reduced bonuses—he explained, she believed. She didn’t notice him staying late at work until midnight, his phone being strangely dead on weekends, or the nervous laugh with which he answered calls in the next room.
On that October day, when the leaves on the poplars had long turned yellow and covered the sidewalk in a wet carpet, a car stopped by the entrance. Viktoria looked out the window and saw her husband helping a woman out of the car, a woman she didn’t recognize at first—the illness had so changed her mother-in-law’s once-strong frame. Anastasia Prokhorovna, who just six months ago had been commanding and upright, had become a shadow of her former self. Stage four lung cancer had drained everything from her, leaving only skin stretched over protruding bones.
“Vika, help me!” Valery shouted from below, a strange bustle in his voice.
In the apartment, he sat his mother on the sofa, adjusted the pillows with exaggerated care, and blurted out, looking somewhere past his wife:
“They’re sending me to Vietnam. For a year. A joint project, assembling machinery. This is a big chance, Vika. Salary in foreign currency, travel allowances.”
“For a year?” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “And your mother? You know cancer medication costs a fortune. Where will we get the money?”
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