A typical evening in a young family’s life was interrupted by a piercing shriek from the bedroom.
— Son! She hid seven hundred thousand!
The mother-in-law, rummaging through someone else’s belongings, discovered a large sum of money in her daughter-in-law’s old bag. Without understanding the situation, the husband burst into the kitchen with accusations.
— You sold your mom’s house and hid the money!
The mother and son, rejoicing at their find, rushed to the bank to open a deposit account, not suspecting the surprise that awaited them.
Lyudmila Sergeevna was making Olivier salad for her husband’s birthday. A typical evening in a typical three-room apartment on the outskirts of the city. Except she wasn’t cooking alone.
Her mother-in-law, Zinaida Ivanovna, had been living with them for three months after her own one-room apartment started to crack. Literally. The building was declared unsafe, and residents were being resettled, but the process dragged on.
— It’s temporary, Lyudochka. We’re not strangers, are we? — the mother-in-law lamented as she moved in with three suitcases and a box of ficus plants. — A month or two, and I’ll be gone with the wind.
Fourteen weeks had passed. Zinaida Ivanovna had settled into the bedroom, evicting Lyudmila and Oleg to the sofa in the living room. She explained it was due to her age and a bad back that required an orthopedic mattress.
The fact that Lyudmila and her husband had bought that very mattress with their own hard-earned money didn’t bother the mother-in-law. Lyudmila chopped boiled carrots into cubes, thinking that her life resembled a layered cake, where each layer was a new portion of patience. First, her mother-in-law rearranged all the dishes in the cupboards because they were ‘not placed correctly.’ Then, she started washing her clothes in the machine three times a day, running up the meters. Then, every evening she would call her neighbors and discuss other people’s lives for hours, only to complain later about a headache from the strain…
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