“Katya, has Sasha told you everything yet?” my mother-in-law said so fast, as if she was afraid I’d get a word in. “There will be forty people. We’ll start cooking at night. I’ll come to you at six the evening before.”
I was standing at the kitchen sink at nine p.m., holding a wet cup over a towel embroidered with a cherry. Water ran down my wrist, and I couldn’t understand why Anastasia Grigorievna was talking about my apartment as if it were a banquet hall.
“What birthday?” I asked.
“Veronica’s, of course. Thirty is no joke. Sasha has already told everyone the party will be at your place.”
Sasha appeared in the doorway. He had taken off his boots but not his jacket, as if he planned to vanish quickly.
“Did you promise this?” I asked.
“Katya, don’t start right away.”
“I haven’t started anything. I’m just asking why forty people are coming into our home without my consent.”
“Our home?” my mother-in-law said. “Sasha lives here too.”
On the fridge, under a magnet with a little lighthouse, hung a shopping list: meat, salads, cake, champagne, and twenty-four disposable plates. Sasha stared at it rather than at me.
The list of things I remembered
“So what now?” she said, throwing up her hands. “Un-invite everyone? You want to ruin your sister-in-law’s party?”
I thought of last year, when Veronica “borrowed our car for a couple of days” and returned it a week later with an empty tank. I thought of the two weekends Sasha drove her out of town and slept at her friend’s place because leaving would have been “rude.” I thought of the money for repairs on her rented flat, money we had been saving for medical treatment.
“It can be at a café,” I said. “Or at her place.”
“Too cramped there,” Sasha answered at once.
“And ours isn’t, because you decided to hand her our living room?”
“It’s just one evening.”
“No. First one evening. Then food from our fridge, cleaning up after everyone, and the bills after forty guests.”
Anastasia Grigorievna set her bag down hard. A key with a red plastic tag slid out. I knew it: the spare key to our apartment, which Sasha had given her “just in case.”
“I’ll come Friday at six. Don’t make me stand outside the door.”
“Don’t come.”
The room went so quiet that I heard metal click in the radiator. Sasha went pale. “Katya, she’s my mother.”
“And this is my home.”
The call at 2:17 a.m.
He looked at me as though I had said something indecent, then called Veronica from the hallway. When he came back he was no longer angry, only worried. The guests were invited, he said, and his mother had already bought some of the groceries.
“That’s not my problem.”
“Do you realize you’re putting me in a terrible position?”
“Do you realize you put me in front of a done deal?”
That night he lay down without a word. His phone, face down, buzzed at 2:17. He grabbed it and went into the bathroom. I didn’t mean to listen, but I heard Veronica’s voice through the door: “If she starts resisting, just bring the papers. Mom says everything is already decided.”
“Not over the phone,” Sasha whispered.
I stood barefoot on the cold tiles, my heart pounding. What papers? What was decided without me?
The brown folder
In the morning, while he was in the shower, I opened his work bag. There was a brown folder with my surname on it. My hand reached for the clasp, and at that moment a key turned in the front door.
I opened the folder anyway. Inside was a printed consent form, already filled in with my name and the address of our apartment. It asked me to agree that Veronica could be registered as a resident in my flat “temporarily,” for a year. It was written to look like a harmless formality, with a line left empty for my signature. Beneath it was a draft of a letter saying the apartment would be “available for family events” whenever Anastasia Grigorievna needed it.
The apartment had been mine before I married Sasha. They knew I would never agree if they asked openly, so they planned to put the papers in front of me in the middle of the party chaos, with forty guests and a table full of food. I would sign to avoid a scene.
The door opened. Anastasia Grigorievna stood in the hallway with her own key in her hand. I held up the folder.
“Would you like to explain this?” I asked.
She went white, just as she had the night before. Sasha came out of the bathroom with wet hair, saw the folder, and stopped.
“Katya, I didn’t want to sign anything for you,” he said quietly. “Veronica said it was only a formality. I told them it was wrong. I just didn’t know how to say no to them.”
“You said it in a whisper, in the bathroom, at two in the morning,” I answered. “Not to them.”
What I decided
I put out my hand. Anastasia Grigorievna hesitated, then placed the red-tagged key in my palm.
“The party is not happening here,” I said. “Veronica can have a lovely birthday at a café. If you want, we can chip in for a gift. But nobody is registered in my home, nobody has a key without asking, and nobody decides things for me again.”
Sasha stood silent for a long moment. Then he took out his phone and called his sister in front of me. This time he said it loudly: the party would not be at our place, and the papers were going in the trash.
Veronica celebrated in a small café. I sent her a card. Sasha and I spent weeks talking honestly about what he owed his family and what he owed his wife. It was not easy, but he finally learned to say no out loud. And I kept my home, my key, and my voice.