“At Least My Older Daughter Is Useful, While You Only Drag Me Down!” Her Mother Declared. But at the Celebration, She Was Left Speechless After Learning Who Had Been Paying for Her Every Whim
The key turned in the lock suspiciously easily. Oksana opened the door, upholstered in worn imitation leather, and immediately froze at the silence of the empty apartment. Maxim’s enormous winter boots were gone from the hallway.
His gray jacket had disappeared from the coat rack as well. Without taking off her boots, Oksana walked into the kitchen. The television remote and a set of keys with a bear-shaped keychain lay on the table. The refrigerator hummed steadily, a car honked outside, and something inside Oksana seemed to collapse.
She took out her phone. It rang, but no one answered. On the tenth attempt, a mechanical voice informed her that the subscriber was unavailable. Maxim had simply packed his things while she was balancing accounts at the small company where she worked.
She slowly lowered herself onto a stool.
Four months pregnant. The morning sickness had only just begun to ease. Just yesterday evening, Maxim had been eating fried potatoes straight from the pan and discussing how they would place the baby’s crib beside the window.
And today, frightened by responsibility, he had run away.
The following morning, Oksana went to see her mother.
Taisiya Nikolayevna lived in a brick apartment building with a concierge. The entrance smelled of men’s cologne and hot pastries from the bakery on the ground floor. Her mother opened the door wearing a silk robe and patches beneath her eyes.
“Have you seen what time it is?” Taisiya Nikolayevna complained, blocking the doorway. “I’ve only just woken up.”
“Mom, please let me in,” Oksana said, her voice trembling.
They walked into the immaculately clean kitchen. A new coffee machine gleamed on the countertop. Oksana clasped her hands tightly and told her everything in one breath: Maxim’s disappearance, the rented apartment she would not be able to afford alone, and the baby she was expecting.
Her mother listened without changing her expression. She slowly poured coffee beans into the machine and pressed a button.
“I told you a year ago that he was penniless. But you’ve always insisted on being independent. You chose him yourself, so now you can deal with the consequences yourself.”
“Mom, I need help. Just temporarily, until I find a job I can do from home. Let me stay in the small room. It’s empty anyway.”
Taisiya Nikolayevna spun around sharply.
“Absolutely not. I worked so hard renovating this apartment after the property exchange. I’m not well. I need peace and quiet, not a baby screaming through the night.”
“I’ll end up on the street, Mom.”
“Then get an evening job as a cleaner. Figure something out! Look at your sister. Yulia married Igor. They have a house outside the city and several cars.”
Her mother’s expression hardened.
“At least my older daughter is useful, while you only drag me down!” she spat. “She bought me a trip to a health resort for my anniversary. All you ever bring me are problems.”
Oksana walked out of the building. A vicious wind struck her face.
She did not cry.
At that moment, the illusion that she had a dependable family to fall back on burst like a soap bubble.
That evening, someone knocked softly on the door of her tiny rented apartment.
Yulia stood on the doorstep. Her sister was wrapped in an expensive cashmere scarf and carried two enormous supermarket bags. She smelled of perfume and the cold air outside.
“Mom called,” Yulia said, walking into the kitchen and carefully setting the bags on the table. “She told me everything.”
Oksana silently turned toward the window so her sister would not see her reddened eyes. Yulia came up behind her and wrapped her arms firmly around her shoulders.
“All right, enough tears. Your Maxim is a coward. We’ll manage without him. I’ve spoken to Igor. He’ll send his movers tomorrow. We’ll move you into a smaller apartment, but it’ll be closer to us. We’ll cover the rent for the first few months. And I’ll bring you a crib and a stroller. We still have everything from Tyoma stored at the country house.”
Oksana burst into tears against her sister’s shoulder.
“Yulia, thank you. Mom wouldn’t even listen to me.”
“Oh, come on. Is this your first day knowing our mother?” Yulia gave a bitter smile. “She needs everything to look perfect from the outside so she can brag to Lyudmila from the neighboring building. Right now, you don’t fit into her picture of a successful life. Forget about her.”
Oksana remembered the next five years only in fragments.
Varya was a restless baby who often cried through the night. Oksana rocked her daughter with one hand while entering numbers into spreadsheets with the other. She took on bookkeeping work for small companies, individual entrepreneurs, and auto repair shops.
She slept three hours a night.
The apartment always smelled of baby cream and cold coffee.
During the first three years, Taisiya Nikolayevna saw her granddaughter only a few times. She would arrive carrying a cheap plastic doll, wrinkle her nose at the cramped apartment, and leave half an hour later.
But she never stopped talking about Yulia.
“Igor bought Yulia another foreign car,” her mother boasted over the phone. “And they had my teeth fixed. They gave me a beautiful new smile. Some people really know how to live.”
Oksana listened silently and agreed with everything.
She had stopped waiting for her mother’s approval long ago. She had another goal now: to get back on her feet.
Word of mouth did its work. The exhausted bookkeeper working from home gradually became the owner of a small but highly sought-after outsourcing agency.
Oksana rented a bright office and hired three assistants. She and Varya moved into a good two-bedroom apartment with a large room for the child.
The difficult period began when Varya turned five.
Yulia arrived at Oksana’s office in the middle of the workday. She looked terrible. Her usually perfect hairstyle was gone, and dark shadows lay beneath her eyes. She sat in the visitor’s chair and covered her face with her hands.
“Yulia? What happened?” Oksana asked, setting aside the contracts she had been reviewing.
“We’re bankrupt, Oksana,” her sister said, her voice breaking. “Igor invested all the company’s working capital in a new shipment of equipment, but the supplier disappeared. The tax authorities have frozen our accounts. We owe money to the logistics companies, and we can’t afford the payments on the house.”
Oksana poured a glass of water from the dispenser and placed it in front of her sister.
“Let’s not panic. Send me all your accounting databases. We’ll see where we can obtain emergency financing and how the debts can be restructured. I know some very competent lawyers.”
Yulia raised her red eyes.
“That’s not all. Mom is supposed to go to her premium health resort next month. She’s already told all her friends about it, but the payment is due by the end of this week. Yesterday she also called and demanded that I order her a massage chair. Oksana, we barely have enough money for groceries. But I’m afraid to tell her the truth. She’ll tear us apart.”
Oksana looked at her sister—the perfect Yulia, their mother’s pride and joy.
“Send me the resort’s payment details,” Oksana said calmly. “I’ll pay for everything. I’ll order the chair too.”
“Oksana, that’s an enormous amount of money!” Yulia shook her head. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do. You and Igor pulled me out of a hole when I was pregnant and nearly homeless. But I have one condition: don’t tell Mom. Let her think the money came from you and Igor. I don’t need her lectures.”
For three months, Oksana practically lived between two offices.
She went through all of Igor’s accounting records, uncovered old debts everyone had forgotten about, and conducted exhausting negotiations with the creditors.
At the same time, she paid for her mother’s whims using her own personal bank card.
Taisiya Nikolayevna called Yulia to praise her for being such a caring daughter. Then she called Oksana and sarcastically asked when she intended to stop counting every penny and finally start helping her mother.
Oksana merely smiled and ended the call.
In October, Igor turned forty-five.
The worst part of the crisis had passed. They had managed to save the company, although its income was still far below its previous level.
Igor insisted on holding a small dinner for their closest relatives at a quiet restaurant. The air around the table smelled of baked fish and fresh herbs.
Taisiya Nikolayevna arrived in a comfort-class taxi. She was wearing a new silk blouse—another supposed “gift from Igor.”
She took the seat at the head of the table, adjusted her perfect hairstyle, and gave Oksana a condescending nod.
When the waiter had poured dry red wine into everyone’s glasses, their mother stood up.
“Dear Igor,” Taisiya Nikolayevna began, sweeping her gaze over everyone present, “I would like to propose a toast to you and my dear Yulia. You are my only true support. You are a real family, one that knows how to show gratitude to its parents.”
Oksana silently cut the vegetables on her plate.
Yulia sat completely still, staring down at the tablecloth.
“Thank you for the resort trip and for that luxurious chair,” their mother continued, her voice growing louder. “You can immediately tell who knows how to use their head and work hard, and who only knows how to disgrace the family! These days, it is so important to maintain one’s status and not live at someone else’s expense.”
Taisiya Nikolayevna gave Oksana a pointed look.
A heavy, suffocating silence settled over the table.
Igor slowly put down his glass. The sound of it touching the tabletop seemed extremely loud.
He looked at his wife and then turned his gaze toward his mother-in-law.
“Please sit down, Taisiya Nikolayevna,” he said calmly but firmly.
“What is it, Igor? I haven’t finished my speech,” she said, blinking in confusion.
“Sit down. Please.”
Their mother lowered herself into the cushioned chair.
Igor took a deep breath.
“Yulia and I didn’t want to ruin your celebration. But I’m not willing to continue supporting this performance. For the past six months, my company has been on the verge of bankruptcy. We sold our second car so we could pay our employees. We didn’t even have enough money to cover the utility bills for the house.”
Taisiya Nikolayevna opened her mouth. Her perfect posture suddenly disappeared.
“What do you mean, you didn’t have any money? What about the health resort? What about the chair? Yulia paid for all of it!”
Yulia raised her head. Tears streamed down her cheeks.
“It wasn’t our money, Mom.”
“Then whose was it?” their mother asked, looking helplessly from her daughter to her son-in-law.
“Oksana’s,” Yulia said quietly. “She paid for the resort, the chair, and even your blouse. All of it came from her personal money. She also saved my family from being taken to court. Oksana now owns the best accounting agency in the city. Igor and I were simply surviving because of her.”
The restaurant became so quiet that they could hear the traffic beyond the panoramic windows.
Taisiya Nikolayevna slowly turned her head toward her younger daughter.
Oksana sat completely relaxed, having placed her fork beside her plate. There was no triumph or resentment in her eyes.
Only indifference.
“Oksana…” Her mother’s voice trembled, all its usual arrogance gone. “Is that true? But how? You used to live in a one-room apartment full of cockroaches.”
“I worked, Mom,” Oksana replied evenly. “At night, without weekends. You were the one who told me to figure things out because you had already finished raising your children. So that’s exactly what I did.”
Red blotches spread across her mother’s face.
She looked down at her carefully manicured hands and at the expensive fabric of her blouse. All the things she had bragged about to her neighbors suddenly seemed foreign to her.
The person she had humiliated for years and regarded as a burden had turned out to be the only one paying for her beautiful life.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” her mother managed to whisper. The realization of her position made her feel almost physically ill.
“What would have been the point?” Oksana gave a slight shrug. “You wanted the illusion of a perfect family. Yulia kept up the appearance because she was afraid of your tantrums. But I stopped needing your approval a long time ago. I was simply repaying my debt to my sister.”
Oksana stood up from the table and picked up her handbag.
“Igor, happy birthday again. You all enjoy the rest of the evening. Varya and I are going home. She has swimming practice early tomorrow morning.”
Yulia jumped up and embraced her sister so tightly that Oksana could barely breathe. Igor gave her a grateful nod.
Oksana called over her daughter, who had been playing in the children’s area, and headed toward the exit.
Taisiya Nikolayevna remained sitting at the fully laid table.
She watched her daughter walk away, trying to say something, trying to call her back, but the words would not come.
Her luxurious silk blouse suddenly felt unbearably rough against her skin.