My seventy-eight-year-old aunt has two sisters. One of her sisters is my mother. Aunt Kate has been married at least ten times. Her last husband died ten years ago. She had no children of her own. Her aunt and her husband lived in an old house that never had any amenities. The house consisted of two rooms, and her aunt had all the conveniences in the yard.
My aunt’s husband was a humorist, the kind of person who is said to be the life of the party. We used to visit them often. My aunt’s little sister lived in Kazakhstan. The sisters kept in touch by telephone conversations.
After my aunt’s husband died we had to go there more often. We bought coal and firewood for her stove with our own money. We also helped her to plant and clean the garden. We never took anything from her, because we had our own dacha. We repeatedly suggested that she move in with us, but she said she was not cut out for city life.
Gradually we put water in her house and eventually gas as well. Then we built all the amenities in the house. And then we built her a bathhouse in the yard and replaced the roof on the house. To make my aunt’s life in the village as comfortable as possible, we sold her room in the communal apartment. In gratitude, Aunt Kate said that she would bequeath the house to our children.
We kept going to see her until she called us. As it turned out, she went to live with her younger sister in Kazakhstan. How is it that before that the sisters did not really communicate, and then such a sisterly love woke up. What about the house? She told us to let it stay for the time being!
I also thought to myself that no matter how the relationship between the sisters develops, maybe Aunt Kate will come back. My sister from Kazakhstan has a family of her own – a husband and an adult daughter. They all live in the same apartment together.
We had the keys to my aunt’s house, and we decided to go next weekend to check it out. Of course, our key to the lock didn’t fit, because it had been replaced, and on the fence was written in white paint in large letters: “For Sale.”
While we were driving home, I found my aunt’s house on a real estate website. I dialed the number of a realtor. It turned out that my aunt’s house had already sold for almost nine hundred thousand. I didn’t call auntie, because I was very offended at her. If not for the money we invested in it, it would have been worthless. My aunt called me a month later and said that she had sold the house and added the money to her nephew, my aunt’s son from Kazakhstan, to buy an apartment. And now I don’t know how to look my spouse in the eye, because the room in the communal apartment was his.
