“Let her.”
“Mom didn’t mean any harm, Claire. She’s simply used to thinking everything belongs to her.”
“That’s exactly what worries me.”
He had no answer.
Margaret did not come into the kitchen that evening. She ate alone in her room.
The next day, she spent a long time on the phone with Rachel, speaking loudly enough for us to hear.
By the end of the week, she announced that she would be celebrating her birthday.
“Sixty-six,” she said. “The whole family will come. We’ll discuss everything then. I’ve already made a list.”
The celebration was held at home on Saturday.
Eight people sat around the table: Daniel and me, Margaret, Rachel and her husband, Daniel’s two aunts, and Linda, Margaret’s former coworker from the dormitory.
Margaret cooked the food.
I set the table.
There were salads, a chilled meat dish, and baked fish.
The guests praised everything.
Margaret accepted the compliments as though someone were presenting her with a certificate she had personally written and awarded to herself.
Around eight, we moved on to tea.
Margaret tapped her fork against her glass.
“I want to make an announcement,” she began. “Rachel is moving here in March, with both children. She has spent long enough crammed into that little place.”
Everyone began nodding.
Rachel stared down at her plate.
“They’ll take the large bedroom, eighteen square meters. The children need room. I’ll stay in the middle bedroom. Daniel and Claire can move into the small one. It’s eleven square meters. Two people will manage.”
The aunts murmured approvingly.
Someone said that people could live happily even in tight quarters.
“This is a family apartment,” Margaret concluded. “My son is the head of the household. He won’t refuse his sister.”
Daniel’s face turned red. He suddenly became intensely focused on slicing a lemon.
I placed the kettle on its stand.
My hands were not shaking.
I checked deliberately.
“Margaret, what gives you the right to decide who gets which room?”
“Because I’m his mother.”
“Being someone’s mother is a family relationship. It isn’t a deed to property.”
Aunt Julia immediately objected that I had no right to speak to an older woman in that tone.
Rachel said that she and the children would not inconvenience anyone.
“Claire, not in front of everyone,” Daniel murmured.
Margaret did not even look at me. She spoke to the guests as if she were delivering a speech from a platform.
“She arrived here to find everything ready,” Margaret said. “Nine years ago she walked into a fully furnished home and still doesn’t understand whom she should be grateful to.”
The room went silent.
From the kitchen came the slow drip of the faucet.
The same faucet Daniel had never quite managed to repair.
I could have stood up and gone to our room.
I nearly did.
Instead, I lifted my teacup and spoke calmly enough for everyone to hear.
“The rooms in this apartment will be assigned by the person whose name appears on the legal documents. Not by the person who is someone’s mother, and not by whoever speaks the loudest. Rachel is welcome to visit for a few days. She will not move in permanently.”
“My son owns this apartment!” Margaret snapped.
I did not argue.
I only shrugged and went to the kitchen to add water to the kettle.
There was no point arguing when there was nothing to argue about.
The metal tin was still on the top shelf.
And inside it were the documents no one had bothered to ask about in four years.
The guests left around eleven.
Rachel left the next morning after kissing her mother on the cheek with exaggerated affection.
On Monday, I called a locksmith.
He arrived at nine and installed a new lock on the door to the bedroom Daniel and I shared—the eighteen-square-meter room Margaret had just tried to give away.
He charged me about eighty dollars and left before lunch.
There was only one key.
I kept it with me.
“This is too much,” Daniel said that evening. “A lock on a bedroom in your own apartment?”
“Exactly,” I replied. “In my own apartment.”
That same day, I ordered an updated extract from the property register.
Three days later, it arrived.
I printed it at work and placed it inside the same tin that held my grandfather’s papers.
I could not have explained why.
I simply put it there.
Margaret battled the new lock for a week.
She pulled at the handle.
She complained loudly.
She told a friend that we were treating her as though she lived in a prison.
Then Daniel was sent away on a twelve-day business trip.
He left Wednesday morning for the installation of a commercial freezer in another city and would be staying at the plant.
On the seventh day, a quiet Thursday, someone rang the doorbell.
I opened it, assuming it was a delivery driver.
A police officer stood in the hall.
He was young, perhaps thirty, wearing a uniform and carrying a folder beneath his arm.
Helen stood behind him in her slippers.
“Officer Ethan Miller,” he introduced himself. “We received a call from this apartment. May I come in?”
Margaret appeared in the hallway fully dressed.