“Denis, who are these people? Where did all these people come from?” Kristina’s voice trembled, and she gripped her son’s elbow tighter. A thought flashed through her mind: He sold it. He sold the dacha without asking me, and now the new owners have come to take over. Her mouth went dry at the thought. She let go of his arm and froze, staring into her own yard.
The boards smelled of pine. The scent was so thick and sharp that Kristina’s nose had already started itching as she approached the gate, and now that smell mixed with lime and sweat. There were people standing in the yard. Many people. Twenty or more. Men in old T-shirts and dusty jeans, two young women carrying rolls of plastic film, a guy on a stepladder, another one right on the roof with a hammer. Someone was dragging bags of cement, someone else was stirring a white liquid in a bucket, giving off the harsh smell of lime. Her summer plot, quiet and gloomy only yesterday, now looked like an anthill in April.
“Denis,” she said dryly, almost voicelessly. “Do you see this? If you sold the dacha without asking me, I will never forgive you. Tell me honestly, are these strangers?”
“Mom, wait, what new owners?” Denis even looked confused. “What are you talking about? They’re mine. All of them.”
“What do you mean, ‘yours’? What is going on here? I have my phone in my bag. If you don’t explain right now, I’m calling the local police officer.”
She really did reach for the bag hanging from her elbow. Her fingers would not obey her. Everything rushed through her head at once: the little house she had struggled to maintain for fifteen years, the veranda she had never built because first Denis needed tuition, then there was the car loan, then her own dentures could wait, then the linoleum in the city apartment could wait. Everything had waited, and now strangers were trampling all over her land. Hers. The one she had cared for like a child.
“Mom,” Denis touched her shoulder. “Listen to me. They are not owners. I invited them.”
Kristina froze with the bag half-raised. She looked at her son as if she were seeing him for the first time. Thirty-five years old, gray already visible at his temples, broad shoulders — like hers, not his father’s. There was no fear in his eyes, no arrogance either. Only a quiet, calm expectation.
“You?”
“Me. Mom, they’re mine. All of them. From work, from university, guys from the courtyard I used to play football with. Do you remember Pasha?”
Kristina remembered Pasha. Thin, always hungry, always staying at their place for dinner because things at home, apparently, were not very good. Back then, she would give him a double portion and pretend not to notice how embarrassed he was.
“Pasha is here?”
“He’s here. And Sashka, and red-haired Mishka, and Yura, who was my best man at the wedding. Almost everyone you fed, Mom.”
Kristina looked around the yard. So that was it. That was why the faces seemed vaguely familiar. The one on the stepladder was definitely the boy she had given Denis’s old bicycle to when his family moved into a communal apartment. And the one with the bucket was Sashka — in ninth grade, he had broken their window with a ball, and she had not scolded him, only asked him to put in a new pane. They had grown up. They had become adult men with strong hands and serious faces. And now they were standing on her plot with boards and seedlings.
“Why?” Kristina asked quietly. “Denis, why?”
Denis was silent for a moment. Then he took her hand — carefully, as if it were made of glass — and turned her toward him.
“You saved for this dacha your whole life, Mom. Remember how you wanted a veranda? A big one, with sliding glass panels, so you could drink tea in summer and watch the sunset? You even pinned a photo from a magazine to the fridge. About fifteen years ago.”
Kristina remembered. Yes, there had been such a picture. It had yellowed, the corners had curled, but she had not thrown it away until they replaced the refrigerator. Then the clipping had been lost, and she had almost forgotten about it. Almost.
“You were saving back then,” Denis continued. “From every salary. Then I had entrance exams, tutors, and rent for my apartment when Vera and I had just gotten married… Mom, you postponed the renovation in your bedroom for six years. You still have those flowered wallpapers that are probably older than I am. I remember how you used to say, ‘It’s fine, the veranda can wait.’ But you know what? It can’t wait anymore. Enough waiting.”
Kristina said nothing. She was silent for so long that Pasha stopped hammering on the roof and froze, watching them.
“I’m paying back my debt to you,” Denis said. “The crew is free. We decided we’d finish it in a week. Here’s the plan, look.”
He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his back pocket and unfolded it. Kristina saw a drawing — neat, with measurements and notes in the margins. Not a magazine clipping. A real project. Made specifically for her small plot, taking into account the old apple tree she had begged them not to touch under any circumstances.
“We’ll build around the apple tree,” Denis said, catching her gaze. “We thought everything through. We’ll strengthen the foundation too. And we’ll install heated floors. I checked — there’s a special system, affordable and reliable. You’ll be able to sit here in November, wrap yourself in a blanket, and drink tea.”
The first tear rolled down Kristina’s cheek and got caught somewhere near the corner of her mouth. She did not wipe it away — she did not even notice it. She just stood there, looking at these grown men who had once played football in their courtyard, scraped their knees, stolen still-hot cutlets from her pot, copied homework from each other at her kitchen table, and argued themselves hoarse about some computer games. And now they had come here. On their own. For free. To build the veranda of her dreams.
But the idyll did not last long. A cough sounded from behind the fence, and a head in a colorful kerchief appeared above the pickets. Vera Anatolyevna, the neighbor on the left. A woman whose face always seemed to say, I told you so. She planted her hands on her hips and stared at the scene as if a national border were being dismantled before her eyes.
“Kristina, is that you?” she sang in a sweet voice with unmistakable steel underneath. “I see noise, commotion, cars coming and going since morning. What is this, a job fair?”
“Good morning, Vera,” Kristina automatically wiped her cheek. “It’s my son and his friends. They’re helping. We’re going to build a veranda.”
“A veranda?” Vera Anatolyevna threw up her hands. “Do you have permission? Do you know what fines they give for unauthorized construction these days? You’ll have to sell the dacha and still won’t be able to pay them off. And besides, your plot is small, Kristina. It’s only three meters to my fence. Are you following the required setbacks? I won’t keep quiet if anything goes wrong, you know. My nephew works in architectural supervision. I can warn him.”
Hearing this, Denis turned around and calmly walked over to the fence.
“Hello, Vera Anatolyevna. We have permission. The project has been approved. Fire safety regulations are being followed. My friend is an architect, and before he drew anything, he checked everything. Would you like to see the documents?”
Vera Anatolyevna turned crimson. She clearly had not expected that.
“Well, well,” she drawled, stepping back. “We’ll see what comes of this. You know how it happens — people build things, and then they have to tear them down at their own expense. And you’re making noise, Kristina. My grandchildren won’t be able to sleep.”
“That’s all right,” Kristina said quietly, and suddenly her voice stopped trembling. “Your grandchildren ate pancakes at my place last August when you forgot to feed them. So they can sleep a little later.”
Vera Anatolyevna pursed her lips and disappeared behind the fence. Pasha, who had been watching from the roof the whole time, gave a quiet snort and picked up the hammer again. And Kristina suddenly felt something like fighting spirit spreading through her for the first time in many years. No. She would protect her dream now.
The next two hours passed for Kristina in a strange, half-transparent state. It felt as if she were dreaming. Denis settled her into a folding chair in the shade of the apple tree, brought her an old mug from the house with a chipped handle — the very same one she had drunk tea from when she used to take him to kindergarten — and poured hot tea from a thermos.
“Sit,” he said sternly. “Your job today is to watch. No ‘I’ll just sweep over here,’ no ‘I’ll water the cucumbers now.’ Understood?”
Kristina wanted to object — purely out of habit, because she had been objecting continuously for the last forty years — but suddenly changed her mind. She leaned back in the chair and began to watch.
She watched Pasha and his partner sawing boards, the saw screeching so loudly that the neighbor’s dog began barking. She watched red-haired Mishka, who was no longer red-haired at all but bald and respectable, mixing mortar and explaining something to the girl with the seedlings. She watched Denis moving from one person to another, clarifying something, helping someone hold a piece in place, nodding to someone else, his face adult, focused, masterful. Her son. The master of this yard. No — the master of the life he was now returning to her, his mother.
By around three in the afternoon, Kristina finally stood up. Enough. Watching was one thing, but this was too much.
“I’ll make lunch,” she told Denis.
“Mom…”
“Don’t ‘Mom’ me. We have twenty people here. They’ve been on their feet since eight in the morning. What have they eaten, sandwiches?”
“Well, we have bread and sausage…”
“Exactly. I’ll be quick.”
And she went into the house. It was cool inside and smelled of summer dust. She opened the refrigerator, which always looked orphaned at the beginning of the season — eggs, butter, a packet of kefir, mustard from three years ago — and sighed. Fine. She would have to improvise.
But when she came out onto the porch to call Denis and send him to the store, someone was already waiting for her. One of the girls — the one with the phloxes — handed her two enormous bags.
“There are vegetables, chicken, eggs, flour, butter,” she said. “Denis bought everything yesterday. He said, ‘Mom will want to cook. Don’t argue with her, just give her the groceries.’”
Kristina took the bags. She looked at the girl. Then at Denis, who was standing a little way off and pretending to study the rafter fastening.
“You,” she said to his back. “When did you manage all this?”
“Mom, I’ve been preparing for three months,” her son replied without turning around. “Just tell me when the pancakes will be ready.”
That was too much. Kristina went into the house, closed the door tightly, and stood there for another minute with her palms pressed to her face. Then she exhaled, rolled up her sleeves, and started making the batter.
An hour later, there was a long table in the yard, which the guys had knocked together from the same boards in literally fifteen minutes. On the table steamed potatoes that Kristina had stewed in three frying pans one after another because there was no large pot at the dacha. There were cucumbers and tomatoes, roughly chopped, just like in her youth, when people did not fuss over salads. In the center rose a mountain of pancakes — thin, lacy, with crispy edges. The very same ones. Her signature pancakes. The ones hungry tenth-graders had once devoured in stacks within three minutes.
“Aunt Kristina,” someone said with his mouth full — Sashka, it seemed, the one who had broken the window. “I haven’t eaten pancakes like these in fifteen years. Honest. My mother never made them. It was always frozen meals at our place.”
“I know,” Kristina said, and suddenly smiled. “That’s why you always stayed at our place until evening.”
Everyone laughed. Loudly, freely, youthfully. Twenty grown people were laughing at her dacha, and that laughter was probably the best sound she had heard in the last ten years.
Suddenly Kristina stood up. She looked around at everyone. Pasha froze with a spoon in his hand. Denis grew alert. She took a ladle, poured compote from the pot into a mug, and raised it in front of her.
“Guys,” she said, and her voice sounded unusually loud. “Forgive me, I cried three times today. The first time from fear. The second from joy. The third because I didn’t know how to thank you. But now I know. I want to drink to you. To each of you. To the fact that you remember. I never forgot your faces, but I thought you had forgotten mine. But you didn’t. That means I fed you for a reason. To you.”
She drank the compote in one gulp as if it were something stronger. For one second, silence hung over the table, and then such a cheer erupted that a crow flew off the neighboring apple tree.
She moved among them, adding more pancakes to plates, pouring tea, listening to conversations, and realizing that she no longer felt anxious. That familiar anxiety with which she had gone to sleep and woken up over the past years. Anxiety for Denis, for his marriage, for his mortgage, for the fact that he earned too little, worked too much, and rarely called. All of it suddenly receded. Because there he was, her son, sitting on an overturned crate with a board on his knees instead of a plate, spreading jam on a pancake and telling someone, “No, the frames are tomorrow. Today the main thing is to finish the gable, otherwise it’ll rain and wash everything out.” And she understood: he had grown up. He could organize twenty people and build a veranda. And he had done it for her.
In the evening, when people began heading to their tents — they had set up camp just beyond the plot near the forest so they would not crowd the place — Kristina sat on the old porch. Denis sat down beside her.
“So, what do you think?” he asked.
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Mom, come on. What thanks? I’m the one thanking you. For everything.”
They were silent for a while. Then Kristina said:
“You know, I always thought parents give to their children, and then the children leave for their own lives, and that’s it. That’s how it is for everyone. I never expected anything. Honestly, Denis. I just wanted you to have a better life than I did.”
“And I do,” he said. “My life is better precisely because you wanted it to be. And now I want your life to be better too. At least with a veranda.”
Kristina chuckled and nudged him with her shoulder — just like back in childhood when he brought home a bad grade in literature and said, “Mom, it’s not like I’m Pushkin.”
“All right, builder. Tomorrow you have those gables again.”
“The gables aren’t going anywhere,” Denis said, offering her his hand and helping her stand.
The week flew by like a single day. On Friday evening, Kristina stood on her new veranda and watched the setting sun flood the garden with orange light. The veranda was exactly like the one in that clipping: bright, spacious, with sliding glass panels and the fresh smell of wood. The boards were not painted yet, but that was all right. There would be time. An old blanket already lay on the floor, and a mug of tea stood on the windowsill. The lavender the girls had planted by the entrance smelled delicate and unsettling, like a promise of the future.
Tomorrow everyone would leave. But tonight they were sitting at the table again, laughing, drinking tea, and eating pancakes. And Kristina suddenly caught herself thinking that what she wanted most in the world was for every one of these twenty people — for Pasha, who was going through a divorce, for Mishka, who was going bald, for the girls with the seedlings whose names she still had not remembered — for all of them to one day have a moment like this. A moment when they understood that kindness comes back. Not necessarily in pancakes. Maybe in boards. Maybe in a veranda. Or maybe simply in the fact that twenty people stand behind you without any agreement and say, “We remember how you fed us.”
In October, when the first frosts came, Kristina sat on her new veranda with a blanket over her knees. Beyond the sliding glass panels, the wind bent the bare branches, but inside it was warm — the heated floors worked perfectly, and the tea in her mug did not grow cold. She picked up her phone, took a picture of the sunset above the apple tree, and wrote to Denis: “Son, the bullfinches have arrived here. Come over. There will be pancakes.”
The message was sent, and she leaned back in her armchair and smiled — slowly, calmly, like a person who had finally stopped waiting.