Roma made his exit in style. The kind of style only a cat has after being thrown out of the kitchen for stealing a sausage—deeply offended, full of self-importance, tail metaphorically in the air.
He slammed the front door. His final words lingered in the hallway like an echo, tossed over his shoulder with all the grandeur of a fallen emperor:
“Miss me while I’m gone! Then maybe you’ll realize what you’ve lost!”
I stood there in the entryway with a ladle in my hand, like the Statue of Liberty if she’d traded her torch for a weapon of domestic labor.
Miss him?
Oh, Roma, you had no idea how exactly I planned to miss you.
I intended to do it with a glass of dry red wine, in perfect silence, with no television blaring in the background and no voice every ten minutes demanding, “Ira, where are my clean socks?”
The cause of our little drama was as old as time and just as ridiculous.
Roma had suddenly decided he wanted freedom.
In his personal dictionary, “freedom” meant a man’s sacred right to spend weekends with his friends discussing world politics and dried fish, while his wife—that convenient household creature with built-in cleaning functions—was expected to keep the place cozy, starch the linens, and make dumplings like an unpaid staff member.
It all started on a Friday evening.
Roma was stretched across the sofa like a stranded starfish, supposedly crushed under the unbearable hardships of life, when he casually announced:
“Irka, next week it’s Pashka’s birthday. We’re heading to the dacha with the guys. Staying overnight. You clean up the apartment while I’m gone, wash the windows too—they look depressing. And buy meat ahead of time. Make cutlets for me to take with me for the boys.”
I slowly lowered my book.
“Roma,” I said, my voice carrying the metallic edge forged by years of marriage, “we were supposed to go to the hardware store and choose tiles. You’ve been whining for six months that the bathroom tiles are falling off. Or did that somehow slip your mind?”
He rolled his eyes so dramatically I half expected him to catch sight of his own brain.
“You’re suffocating me!” he yelled, leaping to his feet. “I’m a man, aren’t I? I have a right to personal space! I’m choking in this domestic prison!”
“You’re not suffocating from domestic life,” I replied, calmly marking my page. “You’re suffocating from your own laziness. And the tile? Let me guess, I’m laying it myself? Or were you hoping it would attach itself through the power of your charisma?”
Roma filled his lungs, clearly preparing a speech worthy of Cicero, but what actually came out was some nonsense about “female traps” and “ingratitude.”
“That’s it! I’ve had enough!” he roared. “I’m going to my mother’s! She appreciates me there! She loves me there! And you—you stay here and think about how you’ve behaved!”
He started tearing through the apartment, throwing things into a bag. The packing itself was a comedy show: one sock, his game console, a jar of his favorite coffee, and my hairbrush somehow ended up in the sports bag. Apparently rage affects coordination.
“Try not to overexert yourself living off your mother’s pies,” I said with a smirk. “Diana Yuryevna is a woman of strict standards.”
“My mother is a saint!” Roma declared theatrically while shoving his feet into sneakers without untying them, crushing the backs in the process. “Unlike you.”
And with that, he left.
Then came the blessed silence.
I poured myself a glass of wine, turned on the series Roma always sneered at as “sugar-coated nonsense,” and ordered a pineapple pizza—the one he hated with a passion.
The evening had serious promise.
Meanwhile, Roma was driving to his mother’s place imagining his grand reception. In his mind, Diana Yuryevna would be waiting at the door like a tragic heroine with a loaf of bread, ready to pity him, stroke his thinning hair, and curse his serpent of a wife.
But reality, as always, prefers to arrive swinging a shovel.
Diana Yuryevna—large, commanding, and built like a woman who had opinions about everything—opened the door in hair rollers, clutching a blood pressure monitor.
“So, you showed up?” she grumbled instead of saying hello, stepping aside to let him into an apartment that smelled of heart drops and old dust. “I was wondering who kept calling. My blood pressure is one-eighty over one hundred, and he’s ringing me. Why are you here? You fight with Ira?”
“Mom, I thought I’d stay… just for a little while,” Roma muttered, already feeling his proud-eagle self-image shrivel into something more like a wet sparrow. “She doesn’t understand me.”
“No one understands you,” his mother sighed. “Take your shoes off, don’t stomp around, and first thing—take out the trash. I’m not supposed to bend over. My blood vessels.”
Roma stared at her.
“Mom, I just got here… I’m tired. I’m stressed…”
Diana Yuryevna looked at him over her glasses the way a sniper studies a target.
“Stress? Stress is when they delay your pension. What you have is nonsense. The trash bucket’s in the hall. And after that, go buy bread. Borodinsky.”
The first two days were hell.
As it turned out, this “saintly woman” was a domestic tyrant on the level of a medieval feudal lord.
At seven in the morning, Roma was awakened not by the smell of pancakes, but by crashing pots and her voice shouting:
“Roman! Get up! That curtain has been hanging crooked for three years!”
At lunch, the moment he tried to lie down with his phone, a rag was shoved into his hand.
“Dust the chandelier. My head spins when I climb the step stool.”
By evening, he was dreaming of relaxing with the game console he had so proudly taken from home, except his mother’s ancient television didn’t even have the right ports, and she herself was glued to endless talk shows about DNA tests.
“Mom, can I change the channel? There’s a football match on…” Roma asked timidly on the third day.
His mother slowly turned toward him with the force of a battleship changing direction.
“Football? Your mother is on the verge of a hypertensive crisis and you’re thinking about football? Selfish! Exactly like your late father! He only ever thought about himself too—right up until he died just to spite me!”
“Mom, Dad died of a heart attack…”
“He died out of stubbornness!” she snapped. “Go rub ointment into my legs instead. They’re aching terribly.”
With growing despair, Roma began remembering our apartment.
He remembered the way I silently set dinner in front of him. The way he could sit up playing his tank game until three in the morning and no one demanded that he massage their lower back with some disgusting, turpentine-smelling ointment.
On the fourth day, he tried to rebel.
“Mom, I’m an adult! I want to rest!”
Diana Yuryevna let out a dramatic sigh and clutched her chest.
“Rest? From what? Doing nothing? Your wife threw you out because you’re lazy! And I’ll throw you out too! I need help, not a tenant with complaints! Just look at yourself—belly hanging out, face all greasy and round like a buttered pancake. Who needs you besides your mother? And frankly, even your mother is getting tired of you.”
That one landed hard.
Roma finally realized his beloved “safe haven” was actually a minefield.
Meanwhile, I was thoroughly enjoying life.
It turned out that without a husband in the apartment, the place stayed three times cleaner, and food in the fridge no longer vanished at supernatural speed.
Then my mother, Valentina Mikhailovna, called.
“So then, daughter,” she asked, “has your great conqueror come back yet?”
“No, Mom. He’s still bathing in maternal affection.”
“Oh, I can feel it in my bones—Diana is giving him the full boot camp treatment,” my mother laughed. “Listen, Ira. Let’s pull a little stunt. I just had an idea. You were planning to go on vacation in a week anyway, right?”
“Yeah…”
“Then move in with me sooner. As for the apartment… well, listen carefully.”
My mother’s plan was brilliant in its wickedness.
Roma broke on the fifth day.
The final straw was his mother telling him to sort through three sacks of old buckwheat because “I think bugs got into it.”
That was the moment he understood he had been wrong.
Ira wasn’t a tyrant.
Ira was a guardian angel who had been shielding him from the far harsher reality known as Diana Yuryevna.
So he packed his bag again—now with an extra jar of anti-radiculitis ointment his mother had forced on him—and called a taxi.
In his head, triumphant reconciliation music was already playing.
He would walk in and say, “I forgive you, baby. I’m back.”
And naturally, I would burst into tears of joy.
He unlocked the door to the apartment with his key, already imagining the smell of borscht.
Instead, he stepped into darkness.
And silence.
A strange kind of silence.
He checked the living room. Empty.
The kitchen. Empty.
There was no dinner on the table. My coat was gone from the rack. In the bathroom, all my bottles, creams, and that lit-up mirror he hated had disappeared.
But the worst shock of all—
the coffee machine was gone.
My beautiful, expensive coffee machine—the one I had bought with my own bonus.
Roma called my number. It rang for a long time, as if my phone was seriously considering whether someone of such limited intellect deserved to be connected.
“Hello?” I sounded cheerful. There was music playing somewhere in the background.
“Ira? Where are you? I’m home!” he burst out indignantly. “I came back and you’re not here! There’s nothing to eat! And… where’s the coffee machine?!”
“Oh, Roma darling,” I sang sweetly. “I simply decided to follow your advice.”
“What advice?” he asked, stunned.
“You told me to miss you while you were gone. So I thought sitting alone inside four walls doing that would be terribly unproductive. I went to stay with my mother. For an indefinite period.”
“With which mother? Why?” His eye was probably twitching by now. “Come back right now! I’m starving!”
“Roma, you’re a free eagle, remember?” I said with venomous sweetness. “Eagles don’t beg for grain. They hunt. So go hunt. I think there’s half an onion and some ketchup left in the fridge.”
“Are you kidding me?!” he screeched. “I can’t stay here alone! I don’t know how to use this new washing machine! And I don’t even have a car to go to the store!”
“Oh yes, the car,” I said in a syrupy voice. “My car, Roma. I took it with me. I need it more. Mom and I are going to a spa resort.”
“A spa resort? What about me?!”
“And you’re a grown, independent man who wanted personal space. Enjoy it. The whole apartment is yours. No one is nagging you, no one is dragging you to choose tiles. Paradise.”
“Ira, this is betrayal!” he shouted. “If you don’t come back right now, I… I…”
“You what? Go running back to your mother again?” I laughed. “By the way, Diana Yuryevna called me half an hour ago. She said you ran away before finishing the windows. She was furious. Said she might come over and check how you’ve settled in—and bring those three sacks of buckwheat with her. So get ready for company, sweetheart.”
Roma immediately imagined his mother ringing the bell. Imagined her stepping inside, seeing the empty refrigerator, the dust I had very deliberately left behind, and him—helpless and pathetic in the middle of it.
“Ira…” His voice wavered and shrank into something mosquito-thin. “Irочка… please. Please. I’ll choose the tile myself if you want. I… I won’t even go to Pashka’s dacha.”
“Too late, Roma. That train has already left, and it’s taking me straight to a spa hotel. The mailbox key is on the little table—there are utility bills in there. Pay them, be a good boy. You’re the head of the household now.”
And I hung up.
Roma stood in the middle of the empty kitchen while his stomach growled treacherously, demanding sacrifice.
Then the doorbell rang.
Insistent. Authoritative.
One long ring and three short ones.
Only Diana Yuryevna rang the bell like that.
Roma stared at the door the way a rabbit stares at a snake. In that moment, he understood that the trap had fully snapped shut. Freedom had turned out not to be some sweet wandering breeze, but a cold draft in an empty apartment where the only things waiting for him were an angry mother and an unpaid internet bill.
He shuffled toward the door in defeat, dragging his feet like an old man.
And I pressed the gas pedal of my little car, feeling the wind from the open window blow away the last scraps of guilt from my mind.
Beside me, my mother sat smiling in satisfaction, unfolding the map of the spa resort.
Sometimes, for a man to understand the true value of comfort, you have to leave him alone with cold, hunger, and his own mother.
And girls, that works better than any therapist.
