“Lyudok, here’s the thing… Mom’s anniversary is in two months. Sixty years.”
Vitaliy’s voice sounded behind her — loud, deliberately cheerful, full of the self-satisfaction of a man about to make someone happy. Lyudmila didn’t turn around. She was sitting at her desk in the living room, which looked more like a mission control center. On a large monitor glowed an Excel spreadsheet with dozens of items: “tent rental,” “catering, option 3,” “floristry, peonies,” “host, fee.” Nearby, on a corkboard, were pinned business cards of photographers, DJs, and drivers. The air smelled of cooling coffee and a bit of ozone from the running equipment. She was just entering into the budget for a large corporation the cost of renting sound equipment, her fingers flying over the keyboard with precise speed.
“You have to organize everything. Like you know how. Top-notch style,” he pronounced the last phrase syllable by syllable, as if tasting it, then patronizingly laid his hand on her shoulder. “You’ll make a gift for Mom, she’ll be over the moon. No discussion — you’re a professional.”
His hand on her shoulder felt heavy and alien. Lyudmila finished entering the figure, pressed Enter, and only then slowly raised her head. Her gaze, accustomed to picking out details and inconsistencies in budgets during the day, now focused just as dispassionately on her husband’s face. On his satisfied, relaxed expression, on the smile that left no shadow of doubt about her enthusiastic agreement.
“Stop! I don’t get it! Why am I supposed to organize your mother’s anniversary—and for free?”
His wife was outraged when he told her this “joyful” news and said it was not up for discussion.
The question came out flat, without a questioning intonation. It was a statement, a fact. Vitaliy’s smile didn’t fade, but froze, turning into a grimace. He removed his hand from her shoulder.
“What’s wrong, Lyuda? What ‘for free’? It’s a gift! It’s Mom! My Mom! How can you say that? It’s family!”
He began pacing the room, from the desk to the sofa and back, his steps heavy, pressing the carpet. He clearly wasn’t ready for this turn and was improvising on the fly, trying to find the right tone of indignation.
“For strangers, you have work, budgets, contracts. But here — for the closest ones! It must come from the heart! You want to charge your own mother for helping organize her celebration?”
Lyudmila silently watched his pacing. Then she pushed the keyboard away, took a blank A4 sheet from the pile and her favorite pen — heavy, metal-bodied, which she used for signing contracts. The click of the retractable tip sounded deafeningly loud in the sudden silence.
“Very simple,” she answered, without changing her tone. “My time, my knowledge, my contacts, built over years, sleepless nights before events, and my nerve cells — all that costs money. For everyone.”
Her pen slid over the paper. Quickly, without smudges, she wrote lines in her signature slightly angular handwriting. Vitaliy stopped and looked at her in confusion as she wrote.
“Here,” she finished and handed him the sheet. “You can review it. This is a preliminary estimate for my services. Concept development. Venue selection and booking. Negotiations and contract signing with contractors: host, photo, video, decor. Event coordination on the anniversary day, calculated for an eight-hour workday. Fifty percent prepayment. Let your mother look it over. If she agrees, she signs a standard contract with me, and I start work tomorrow.”
Vitaliy took the paper skeptically. He looked at the neat lines, at the figures with several zeros at the end. His gaze bounced between the sheet and her impenetrable face. He expected anything: arguments, persuasion, maybe even tantrums. But he wasn’t prepared for a business offer. He looked at her, his wife, and saw a stranger — an efficient, cold manager who had just billed his mother. Vitaliy’s face slowly flushed, changing color from normal to dark red, almost crimson.
The crimson shade thickened, turning into the color of an overripe plum. He clenched the sheet in his fist. The thin office paper crackled in protest but did not tear — his fist was more demonstrative than truly strong. He threw the crumpled ball onto the desk, aiming at the keyboard, but missed. The paper bounced off the stack of documents and silently fell onto the carpet, white and alien against the dark pile.
“Are you out of your mind, Lyuda? Completely lost it with your projects?” — he switched to a hissed, strained whisper, far nastier than an open yell. “What is this stunt? Is this how you show respect to my mother? Charging her like some one-day company?”
He leaned on her desk, looming over her. He smelled of office lunch and slight irritation he obviously brought from work, now finding its outlet.
“She’s your mother! She took you into the family when you were alone. She brings you her pies on Sundays because she knows you don’t like cooking! She brought seedlings for your balcony in spring! That doesn’t count? Or did that need a price list too? ‘Pie — five hundred rubles, tomato bush — one hundred’? Is that it?”
Lyudmila did not flinch. She calmly held his gaze, looking up into his anger-distorted face. She slowly rolled her chair half a meter back, restoring distance.
“Pies are her hobby, Vitalya. She enjoys messing with dough. Seedlings are her interest. She gets pleasure from that. And I always thank her. But this,” — she gestured at her work corner: monitor, printer, stacks of fabric and cardboard samples — “this is not a hobby. This is my work. The very work that paid for our vacation in Italy last month. The one that covered half the loan on your car. This is not entertainment. It’s one hundred percent concentration, sleepless nights, missed deadlines from suppliers, and dealing with unreasonable clients. It’s an asset I’m not going to give away for free just because someone finds it convenient to call it my ‘female duty’ — to create celebrations.”
Her words were like precise, calculated strikes. She didn’t raise her voice, but every word hit its mark. She saw the vein twitch at his temple. He couldn’t find anything to object to her logic, and it irritated him more. When arguments run out, insults come next.
“So that’s what you really are,” he straightened, folding his arms across his chest. “Cold, calculating businesswoman. I thought I married a woman, but it turned out to be a calculator. Everything for you is numbers, everything in budgets. No soul in you, Lyuda. Not a drop.”
He pulled his phone out of his pocket and ostentatiously started searching contacts without taking his contemptuous gaze off her.
“Fine. You want to play business? We’ll play business. But the client has the right to know all the terms of the deal directly from the contractor, right?”
He brought the phone to his ear. Lyudmila understood what he was doing. He wasn’t just calling for help; he was bringing into the game the main figure, whose name was not to be uttered in such disputes.
“Mom, hi. Yeah, everything’s fine… almost,” his voice instantly changed, taking on suffering, son-like tones. “I’m talking with Lyuda about your anniversary. Yes, of course, she’ll help, Mom, how else… She’s our professional. She even prepared a commercial offer. To make it official.” — He paused, letting the phrase sink into the consciousness of the person on the other end. He looked directly at Lyuda, enjoying the effect. — “No, Mom, you misunderstood. The invoice isn’t from the restaurant. It’s from her. She sent you a bill… for her services organizing the event.”
He listened for a few seconds, nodding. His face showed sympathy and sorrow.
“I understand, Mom. Yeah. I’m shocked too. Don’t worry. Can you come over? Yes, right now. She’s here. Discuss the details… of her business project. Okay, we’re waiting.”
He hung up and put the phone on the desk.
“Mom’s coming now. She wants to look her manager in the eye and discuss contract terms. Get ready for negotiations.”
Vitaliy didn’t sit down. He stayed standing in the middle of the living room, taking a position somewhere between the sofa and his wife’s desk, like a referee in a ring he himself had arranged. He was confident in his rightness, in his power, reinforced by the imminent arrival of maternal support. In this pause filled with the humming of the computer and ticking wall clocks, he reveled in his role — son defending his mother’s honor and husband putting his insolent wife in her place.
Lyudmila, by contrast, showed no sign of worry. She didn’t jump up or rush around preparing to defend herself. Instead, she calmly leaned down, picked up the crumpled sheet from the carpet, and carefully, nail by nail, smoothed it out on the tabletop. She straightened every crease and fold until the paper was nearly flat again. Then she placed it in a visible spot by the monitor and returned to her mouse, going back to her Excel spreadsheet. This was not an escape from reality. It was a silent but firm statement: your theater is your theater, and I have work.
No more than fifteen minutes passed before a sharp, demanding knock on the door pierced the tense atmosphere. It sounded not like a guest’s but a summons. Vitaliy perked up and went to open it, a mixture of anticipation and righteous anger written across his face.
At the threshold stood Klavdiya Petrovna. She did not look like an angry fury. On the contrary, she appeared the embodiment of offended virtue. Well-groomed hair, a strict but expensive coat, holding not a grocery bag but a large plastic container faintly smelling of baked goods. She entered the apartment without removing her shoes, went straight to the living room, and first addressed her son, deliberately ignoring the daughter-in-law seated at the table.
“Vitalyochka, I flew here so worried. What’s going on here? What happened?” Her voice was full of tragedy and motherly care, meant for one but spoken to two listeners.
Vitaliy immediately picked up that note.
“Here, Mom, look. Lyudmila is our businesswoman now. Family is just another project for her.”
Klavdiya Petrovna finally acknowledged the daughter-in-law with a look. She slowly approached the table and set her container right on top of the stack of designer cardboard samples.
“Hello, Lyudochka. Vitalya told me you’ve been very busy lately. That you have no time for us, for the family.”
“Hello, Klavdiya Petrovna,” Lyudmila turned her chair to face her mother-in-law. Her tone was impeccably polite, as at a meeting with an important client. “Please, sit down. Vitalya exaggerates a bit. There’s time, it’s just a question of how we use it.”
“I see,” Klavdiya Petrovna said, her gaze studying her. “We thought sixty years was a big celebration. That you, as family, would help, advise, rejoice with me. But it turns out… it’s now called ‘time management.’”
Her gaze fell on the smoothed sheet on the table. She picked it up with two fingers, disdainfully, as if it were something dirty.
“So this is what it is… ‘Preliminary estimate.’ What fancy words now…,” she read aloud, metal ringing in her voice. “Concept development… contractor selection… coordination…” Lord, Lyuda, it’s your husband’s mother’s anniversary, not a spaceship launch!”
“This is my job, Klavdiya Petrovna,” Lyudmila answered calmly. “I take it seriously, whether it’s a wedding for two hundred or an anniversary for thirty. A doctor in a clinic doesn’t operate on relatives for free just because they’re relatives. He does his job. So do I.”
“Don’t compare God’s gift with scrambled eggs!” Vitaliy snapped, unable to stand her calmness. “A doctor saves lives, and you… You just make menus and pick balloons!”
“Exactly!” Klavdiya Petrovna chimed in, throwing the sheet on the table. “We asked nicely! To help like a daughter! And what do you give us? A contract? A bill? Do you want me, a pensioner, to pay you for calling the restaurant you yourself recommended? Is that how gratitude looks now for everything we did for you and Vitalik?”
She stepped toward Lyuda, and her face, previously mournful and offended, became hard and angry. The mask was off.
“I thought my son had a wife. A family. But it turns out he just has a business partner who lives with him in the same apartment. You turn everything into a deal. Everything in your life has its price. Tell me, Lyuda, does love, care, respect for elders also have a price in your price list? Or is that a ‘free option’ in the contract?”
“Price? You want to talk about price, Klavdiya Petrovna?” Lyudmila’s voice held neither offense nor anger. Instead, it carried a cold, almost academic interest she usually showed when clients started disputing obvious expenses. She slowly stood up from the table, and this simple gesture made Vitaliy and his mother involuntarily take a half-step back. “Fine. Let’s talk about price. But not about the price of my services, about the price of your ‘love and care.’”
She leaned on the tabletop with her fingertips. Her gaze slid from her mother-in-law to her husband and back.
“When your nephew needed urgent help organizing his wedding two years ago because his bride messed everything up, who spent four sleepless nights calling my contractors and begging them to accommodate? Who found him a host, photographer, and venue a week before the date? Was that ‘love’? Or was it free use of my professional resources?”
Vitaliy opened his mouth to say something, but Lyuda stopped him with just a look.
“When you started repairs at the dacha and couldn’t decide on the veranda design, who spent two weeks drawing sketches, selecting materials, and making work plans so your builders wouldn’t mess things up? Was that ‘care’? Or was it a free interior designer consultation that other people pay big money for? When your car was in repair for a month, who every day after work drove across town to take you shopping, then waited in the car for an hour? Was that ‘respect for elders’? Or a free taxi and personal driver service?”
She spoke evenly, enunciating each word. This was not a scandal. This was billing. A bill accumulated over years that she never intended to present. But they asked for it themselves.
“All your so-called care, Klavdiya Petrovna, always had a second bottom. Your pies,” she nodded to the container standing on her documents, “are a perfect excuse to come uninvited and check on us. Your advice is a way to control our lives. Your ‘help’ is an investment for which you always expect dividends. In my time, my energy, my nerves. You are used to me being a convenient, multifunctional, and most importantly, free option in your life. And in your son’s life.”
Klavdiya Petrovna looked at her, and on her face was no longer offended dignity but pure, blatant hatred. She saw her manipulations no longer worked. This girl, this daughter-in-law she considered obedient and manageable, suddenly showed a steel backbone.
“You…” she hissed, the word dripping with venom. “You’re just ungrateful…”
“Mom, let’s go,” Vitaliy finally found the strength to intervene. He stepped to his mother and took her arm, finally choosing his side. He didn’t defend his wife. He didn’t try to understand her. He simply decided to evacuate his mother from the lost battlefield. “There’s nothing left to discuss here.”
They moved toward the exit. Klavdiya Petrovna, already standing in the hallway, turned and threw Lyuda one last phrase, the cruelest she could manage.
“Barren fig tree,” she said quietly but clearly. “No children, no soul. Only numbers in her head.”
Lyudmila was silent. She watched as her husband opened the door for his mother. He didn’t look at his wife; his gaze was downcast. At that moment, Lyudmila went to her desk, took the plastic container with pies that was still standing on her papers, and silently followed them. She reached the open door, stepped onto the landing, and carefully, without knocking or making noise, put the container on the doormat outside her door. Then she returned to the apartment and looked straight at her husband, who was still holding the door handle.
“My anniversary gift to your mother,” she said in an icy, perfectly calm voice. “For free. A farewell gift.”
Only after that did she close the door in his face. Without a slam. Just the quiet click of the lock…
