"You're obligated to help your little sister; she has children!" Klavdia Petrovna protested, theatrically pressing her plump hands to her chest. "Have you completely lost your sense of numbers? We're family! You'll be patient!"
Marina stared at her mother in silence, feeling the tight, cold spring of learned guilt begin to coil within her, as if by habit. In this fiery tirade, Klavdia Petrovna had forgotten one small but crucial detail from Marina's childhood. That very detail, because of which the word "family" had long since given her the taste of cheap instant noodles and a ringing loneliness.
When Marina turned nineteen, her grandmother died. She left behind a nice two-room apartment in a good neighborhood. Klavdiya Petrovna, having inherited the property, called a family council consisting of herself, Marina, and twelve-year-old Olenka. Her mother then said in a tone that brooked no argument: "Marina, you're already grown up. You're studying, you work part-time at the cash register. Rent a room, you'll manage. And this apartment will be for Olenka. She needs stability for the future; she's a fragile girl."
The next day, Marina packed her things into two plaid bags and left for the student dorm, which smelled of fried onions and hopelessness. For the next twenty years, she literally clawed her way to a place in the sun. She worked nights, finished college, took on endless part-time jobs, moved from one firm to another, slowly but surely climbing the accounting ladder.
Marina was now forty-two. She had a mortgage, but a cozy one-room apartment bought at the very limits of her means, a job as chief accountant at a logistics company, chronic sleep deprivation, and a left eye that twitched from stress.
Olenka was thirty-five. She lived happily in that very same grandmother's apartment, had never officially worked a day in
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